Gorgeous Day for
a Dictatorship
Who’s that crying in the room above
the doctor’s office? Is it true you can
never have too many doctors?
Is that you dancing all night long?
Koko Taylor belting out “Wang Dang Doodle”?
Can it be you who I thought would live
another thirty years? It’s me, who can’t
be heard by you anymore, though we did
not speak for years when we were still all ears,
like many of us who thought we’d never stop.
Is that you nodding out into your meatloaf with gravy.
and overcooked diner spinach, photographed in front
of a clown holding a bomb, burying your
sister and brother, joking with poets
in dead end rooms, holding court
in your second hand shop in a neighborhood
already doomed by gloom-eyed speculators and
tight-panted hipsters in search of passion. Is that you?
Is that you smiling at your son’s Viking helmet,
sitting on a couch forty years ago? Time sliding
back and forth to the rhythm of your voice…
Is that you looking a hundred years old
sitting next to your mother, a meadow
in Pennsylvania, lush in life and death?
Was that you, a darling and loved one
neglected for decades, making gardens
in narrow backyards, cooking up salmon
and broccoli in those dark rented houses,
one poem and a thousand journal pages?
Is that you lying next to your son as he tells
me you are dead, all senses now left at the front desk,
your bemused voice tucked back into the Earth,
your kindness and will to live folded away
in a painless nowhere, time
shared with you pulled in a taut bow
ready to be sprung again some place else?
If gods want to live where suffering ends,
why do they keep such ungodly hours?
I thought you would live.
Your words are heard in Russia.
Your brain is in New York.
Your heart is a synagogue
for the unfaithful.
Timing is everything, in life
as in art. You were never
political, so you died before
election day. You shared the same specialist
with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, so you both
decided to die the same week,
neither of you to be written in the book
of the new year, your liver and her pancreas
talking the same talk, you turned to ashes,
she lying in the hall of the big boys.
We lived all night in the heyday
of drive-by shootings. We looked
at each other and thought did they say,
“drive-in movies?” We didn’t have a car
anyway. I thought you would live,
give your sadness to song so strangers
who knew you forty years ago knew
you wouldn’t disappear.
I walk along the river.
In passing two elder women, I say
it’s a beautiful day, a gorgeous day
for a dictatorship. They know I’m not
talking about Mr. Rogers, but these days
they think you can’t trust anyone.
(through my electronically-enhanced hearing you say, “Don’t worry about him. He’s inhaled too many paint fumes and he hasn’t had enough to drink.”)
In the personal logic of my daydream,
I think of you as I am smitten
by the disdainful silence of my ambulating colleagues.
The sorrowful knowing you are not here,
not in any way, no chance will we ever
bump into each other again, not a shot in hell,
not in the grid pattern laid out like a warning,
not in the hundred lives invented
to keep this one alive. A September breeze cools
my face. I hear fading words of women behind me.
Something about Mussolini’s lamppost revenge,
something about a German draft dodger
a frozen time ago, making his fortune in a Klondike
Dawson City whorehouse, his freak offspring…and I
realize you are this close to walking next to me.
RS/2020