At the confluence of tea roses and Russian sage
we made a right at the curved iron fence,
one of my dead friends beside me explaining how trees communicated
but I couldn’t understand a thing because it was all blurry —
the way it gets — and though I knew him well
I couldn’t say for sure now whether it was Larry or
Phil or Galway or Charlie until I realized it was me
talking in some kind of Hebrish they spoke
in my town by the Delaware and it was used
for code the way one of the Amerindian languages
was used in World War II the Germans couldn’t in a
million years break since they weren’t as pragmatic
irrational and in-your-face as the English and Americans were.
I noticed the bees were digging in for a late lunch
of what for them was boiled beef and horseradish
or maybe it was just for me and they were bent over
guzzling madly while paying no attention to the two
of us or in any way tired of the nectars since it
ran the whole gamut from oysters to soup to — well —
boiled beef to strawberry-rhubarb pie
and a little whisky after, some of it spilled on the
vanilla ice cream that underlaid the pie it had once overlaid,
all of this depending on the blossoms they circled over
and bent down upon, a cafeteria as good as the one
on Broadway called Stanley’s I circled and bent over
expending nickels dimes and quarters when the Dulles brothers
ran the country.
It was Larry, I’m sure now,
and what we talked about was cardboard
and we were amazed that in the open spaces
beside the hotel on 47th Street
there were four or five small cardboard “houses,”
both of us remembered,
the homeless had claimed to sleep in and provide
a safe place for their black plastic garbage bags,
the size of a room at the Sloane House on 34th Street
near the Pennsylvania Station where I put up
the price of a meal then for a clean pillowcase
with little or no stuffing and a cardboard
bed as stiff as metal and a cardboard
breakfast of cardboard bread and eggs and between us
we talked cardboard, shirts from the cleaners with sheets of
cardboard we drew on, cardboard soles in ruined shoes
we both wore when we were children, cardboard hats,
cardboard to lie on listening to outdoor concerts
and cardboard masks we made with scissors and crayon
for costume dances, balls is what we called them
as if we were art students in Paris about to
swim in the nearest fountain.
Though what I want to
say is the bees were too busy to do us any
harm and it was packs of wild dogs, not swarms
of bees, that terrified me (Larry, too) except for one
occasion when I pushed the wrong end of an old
broom into a hive of yellow jackets on the underside
of a low-lying garage roof and an angry swarm chased
me through the yard and over a fence hating
any form of criminal intrusion, urban renewal, or
gentrification, I who couldn’t resist intrusions,
who never could, omnivorous as I was, living on
apples and bananas as well as baby lamb chops,
who ran like hell that day (Larry, too)
for we in our separate ways didn’t want to be
paralyzed then eaten by larvae, none of us dead ones did.
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