Friday, May 10, 2013

mcmvii

What was I going to say?  Oh.  I’m
going to bed now.  Yes.  Trying to.
I’m going to bed but kept up
by Rae Armantrout and Bill Berkson.

Time is I say their names first only. 
Does it make me more like them (
thinking positively because of the
actual love, this whatever-it-is with

people we admire and read and even
occasionally have the opportunity to
sit down at a table and talk the talk
with.  To talk business with.  What-

ever the case, I don’t mind, really,
only I’m never of one mind.  Tonight
I’m just here with them, or they with
me, for real with the dust that climbs the hill—

Hey, Bill!!   Hey, Rae!!  Love is as free of
cynicism as my good man Brandon Brown
is today (my good man, I said it!). 
And that’s pretty full of something

really divine, like what’s floating up
from down Mason tonight—a trumpet
(perhaps pulled from somewhere mid-
last-century and blocks West—a bleaker,

ballsier Fillmore Street (perhaps I have
the decades confused).  It’s all so very
un-figure-outtable to me, but a lovely
dream of cool air for a stir-crazy evening.

And now there’s strumming—a banjo?—
Nob Hill’s brimmingfrom every possible
direction until I’m...I’m....well, I’m going
to say this, too: I’m sated!  Hey, Brandon!!

Hey, Ron!!  Hey, Steph!!  Hey, Cynthia!!
A big hello to Rodney & Auden!!  And
hello again to all of the Bills, every
last one of you!!   Hi, Mom!  Hi there, Otto! 

And how do you do Miss Coco the Loco.
Hello, everybody!!  Hello, everyone!!