Brasserie
We’re somehow in Closerie des Lilas,
here in Richmond, capital of the not yet
dead Confederacy. My well traveled friend
tells me his Dublin friend has cancer,
that it has spread to his liver, his friend
as full of life and success as this Art
Nouveau décor and now full of cancer.
We have martinis. We have champagne
and Chardonnay. We have splendid
onion soup, oysters two ways, both
excellent. Cosmopolitan, we finish with
espresso and biscotti. I don’t know what
to say about his friend, the playwright
who’s probably dying. So, we talk of
the play my friend’s directing, of
O’Neill’s clunky, hungry, glorious
career, of Tennessee Williams, then
Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, both of whom
I refuse to read in translation. The place,
I say, is perfect for Paris in the Twenties,
and so are, our Hungarian waitress says,
the urinals. Twenty-five, she’s been here
only four months. How would she know?
neither of us asks. I’ll have to check, I say,
and sure enough, there they are, side by
side, two of the old heavy ones, substantial
as tombstones, dropping all the way to
the black and white tiled floor, maybe
just like the pissoirs Hemingway stood
before, wavering, trying not to wet his
white espadrilles. Or, would he have had
a prim porcelain hole in the floor like
the ones I had to negotiate in 1990s Italy?
Easy in, not so easy out. My friend is having
his first drink since the hospital where he
lost thirty pounds. I find him grinning
behind another martini. Laura, somehow
still Hungarian, asks if I’ll have another.
Yes, I say to both of them, you were correct.
An Annunciation of Blue
Our jays are the Angel Gabriels
of the bird kingdom,
terrifying, beautiful,
bringing tidings
that can make you throw up
with joy.
They have ousted the delicate
blue birds
from the little house
on the north side
of the garden. Spoilers only,
they will never nest in it.
I know they can see
their shared blues, can see
hues I will never
divine in this short life
and still these carnival crows
bully and bereave
like Signorelli’s swooping messenger
on the edge
of Volterra’s wasteland,
delivering impossible news
from the other world,
with the unmoved face of Bernini’s Apollo,
the practical clarity
of the psychopath who ripped
out of history Daphne, Mary,
Zacharias, Daniel, and Muhammad, out
of disorder and uncertainty
into that conviction
shared by martyr and inquisitor,
torturer and tortured,
and who go about
their inhuman business
under a sky that both vividly is
and is not in fact blue.
