Conversation With Carlo

title poem from old collection (unpublished)

 

They call and say

they will bring the furniture

tomorrow.  Tonight,

I sit here

drinking cheap wine from my coffee cup

watching the Arizona sunset through the patio doors

imaging

what this place might be like

inhabited with life.  The wine tastes better cold

and I have convinced myself

that drinking from a coffee cup means

I am still a civilized man.

 

The man on the bottle is smiling.

His living room, he says, is empty too.

The dead don’t have living rooms

or bedrooms, and they don’t worry

whether or not the furniture matches

or if the thermostat is broken.

He is smiling

because he is beyond my concerns.

There are only the grapes in his hands;

they’re drawn in, anyway

and would make for lousy wine—

 

but the dead can’t get drunk, either.

They can only lay in their coffins,

reminiscing about days of sleeping on the floor

in a bed roll, when their biggest concern

was worrying about whether the alarm clock worked

so another day

would not be missed.

 

This conversation

doesn’t make the furniture appear any faster.

But it passes the time.

And I have given up the pretense of the coffee cup

Author's Note

Any comments welcome