“
Now reading
Said the Parakeet
B.D. was a decent
poet but difficult
to define or for himself to self-divine,
a follower, a “gift” the way one seeker,
loose but selective,
identified himself
to an intoxication
reading obnubilating poems
in a brick-and-river town:
a generous, ecstatic overnight.
A present, or an absence
needing to be present, who tailed me,
who mailed women years ago when he
was free with his attention,
a fixation that he felt attended him.
Sometimes several times a week
then several times a day
he’d write me, for he was free
to borrow books, go to the mailbox
at 3 a.m., for it was urgent that he send
a bride issue of Vogue, Bazaar,
(not Seventeen, but Glamour, but not Ms.)
from the Heartland where
(Don’t forget our wedding date!)
he bubble wrapped some trinkets, snapshots —
poses of his parakeet beside his own long head
meeting at an angle in a steely mirror.
His wife, from her wheelchair,
had made their camera flash.
He tried to kill his wife
with a little hammer,
the D.A. calling said. The D.A. asks
who are his friends; he cannot name
or call a single one. Define what
friendship saves your isolation from.
Detained, he clarifies for me:
It was a little hammer.
His cursive changed to printing
turns to scribbling
before during after in the medical facility.
He isn’t a bad poet. A decent poet
and a bad carpenter, says Vonnegut
at dinner one free-and-easy evening in our town.
Some centuries go by
and on archival acid-free papyrus
or newfound stock of eco-friendly mulberry
an American Greek Anthology:
a poem by B.D.,
and next to him one by Anonymous
influenced by somebody who influenced
anxiety in all of us.
My fragment says, She lived, who was his nail.
And she lived, unguarded, curiously
— by no one that she really knew —
held very dear.