FAREWELL TOUR, NEW YORK
I
A Hotel Beacon crammed
with coincidences: assigned floor
same as for the long-defunct
Croyden residential unit
I’d infested during adolescence;
and our current room, a rear,
1618, wore the number
of my wife’s girlhood
Georgetown street address:
up high enough to capture
ample sky, profiles of semi-
distant buildings; specifically,
facing East—i.e. backward
toward youth—the paired
Majestic’s luxury spires,
locus of her precociously lost
virginity. Diagonally below,
@ Amsterdam and 75th,
Riverside mortuary, which in December,
1985, processed my no-
longer-disappointed father.
II
Having arrived late afternoon a day before
the concert, we drank lavishly
at a nice Italian place—the heart-
burn acute though brief—received
an unexpectedly good breakfast
via our considerate, unsmiling
Russian waitress, then walked
overcast Central Park
among the May Day ghosts,
bitterer than sweet, topping
off Lenox Hill with a primo
hamburger.
III
Her show rejected
anticlimax: my fifty-three-
year-older anima (counting
from 8/17/1963,
when I first heard her live
at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium,
a soprano with ample, hippie-straight
black hair) verging on eighty,
deprived of higher octaves, never
sold her values out, performed
strongly, a two-hour set
devoid of intermission, threw in
three encore numbers, walked off
as always her own woman.
We the geriatric audience
who’d doddered in, filling the restored
1929 phantasmagorical
Beacon Theater, cheered and cheered
for what she was as well as
what we once had been.
HERBY THE FRIENDLY CACTUS
belonged to a paranoid family—suspicious, passive-aggressive, expecting at all times the worst—who labeled Herby a changeling dumped by his actual parent, likely a bland euphorbia. He grew up isolated by his optimism, his openhearted determination to promote goodwill, waxing tall, with smooth green limbs that only looked soft, fleshy. One day Herby noticed Adelaide: different, feminine. Where he expected thorns she bore downy-looking puffs and small purple flowers attractive to bee swarms that inhabited their oasis. By now Herby rarely spoke to anybody, aside from a half-stifled Please pass the salt, but made an exception for her, and they shared opinions, within the bees’ overhearing, about how they wished the world were friendlier. As bad luck likes to have it, what should choose to retire a short distance from Herby and his new confidante? An arthritic over-the-hill Tyrannosaurus rex badly slowed by maladies, hence no longer able to chase down his animal prey, who now subsisted resentfully on plants, which in his irritation he tore to pieces and trampled far beyond the needs of appetite. Whom should he approach with his I’m coming to get you scowl but the two companions! What a dreadful situation!! which would have played out gruesomely if not for the bees, who during prolonged nectar-foraging sessions appreciatively absorbed the Muzak of sweet interchanges, such generous, soothing words, and therefore decided to assert themselves. Although insects could have accomplished little with a therapod in its prime they wholly demoralized this neuralgic, half-addled specimen by means of judicious, venomous stabs to its eyes, nostrils and anus, motivating that creature to stumble back the way he came. The bees celebrated as if they’d just won the FIFA Women’s World Cup, while Herby and Adelaide showered them with confetti-like bits of plant debris. This proved, the friends asserted, how solidarity matters more than the Second Amendment or a skin-load of lethal spines. The bees weren’t quite sure they agreed, yet it had been said so inoffensively they didn’t protest.
HOMEBOUND
I’m very satisfied with my bulk-
head window seat’s legroom,
enough for the Cardiff Giant,
and agreed to unlatch, as needed,
the proximate red-’n-white-
stickered portal inscribed
Open Abrir, Exit Salida,
to bow out my guests like
a grandee on the Spanish Main,
his town under attack by
Elizabethan corsairs: Damas,
senores, duennas, kindly
disregard all smoke and flames
as you vault bravely into your
gaping futures thank you I hope
the flan tickled your palates
adios por favor mi casa su
queso come again if anything’s
still here once those anglo hijos
des putas have sailed away.
THE POEM THAT DOESN’T NEED TO BE WRITTEN
smells like ass, only not
in a good way. Dinner’s on
the table, and, having invited
itself, it holds forth about you,
passive-aggressively telling
another’s truth, so as to vacuum up all
the applause while undermining that one’s
personal selfhood. See, it smirks,
there I go pretending you’re not
getting upstaged and I’m not
the selfish prick doing it. Now
I’m confessing with total
insincerity. Please, I offer,
it’s your turn to be admired.
Here. I pass the mic
ostentatiously, for spectators
to appreciate how generous
I can be, how admirably
self-effacing. Better I should
just sit down in some corner,
silently repent, certainly not
write anything for a long long time.
Paul Watsky, a Jungian analyst with a practice in San Francisco and Inverness, California, was poetry editor of Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche for the past seven years. He is co-translator with Emiko Miyashita of Santoka (Tokyo, 2006), and has two collections of his own, Telling The Difference (2010), and Walk-Up Music (2015), the latter of which received a recommended review from Kirkus. His work has appeared in Smartish Pace, Interim, The Carolina Quarterly, Rattle, Word Riot, and elsewhere.
