for Suzie, Aaron, and Bill
1. good dreams that never want to wake up
2. best friends, unconditional love
3. music only cats can hear
4. rosemary that refuses to stop growing
5. all the stories you want to read
6. all the hours you want back
7. the grey storm streaked with lightning
8. the soft sounds
What is your real name? I hate being called wife, without a name. I think you do too.
How do you feel with a mouth full of salt instead of the languid, tamarind language of your city? The city that sings to you and you the only one who hears her.
What does she sound like? Soprano or alto? Silk or broken windows? Do the cries of the market slide down her throat like tamarind or salt?
Does the gutter water taste like gutter or peppermint schnapps?
I think I could live married to my city as the queen or live lost and alone with no one but my city to comfort me.
When you died, when your city died, you were looking at each other.
What was that like?
(Photo Credit: Sodom’s destruction; Lot and daughters escapes. Dom von Monreale, Sizilien)
(My mom’s cousin Charlie)
Organized by Salvatore Saraceno and Elita T. Agee
National Arts Club, New York March 1992
(after the death of Wislawa Szymborska, February 1, 2012)
I take the petit four
of your poem and put
it in my mouth;
let my tongue soak it up—
soft words
dissolving
softly
as a
spring weekend
—inhale the sugar flower.
The decadent scrim
of icing glosses over
everything.
“The sun rises and the sun
sets and I eat
this cake and you are
no longer in this world.
A violet grows on the verge
of a yard and a street;
efficiently
crystallizes in another poet’s
greedy panting
despite your vacant house,
your supercilious cat
and your mouth that
will never eat cake again.
I am eating
cake and I am not
efficient. Pieces of your
poem clot against my teeth
and I cannot speak.
