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BACKPACK AT THE BAG CHECK
by
Jackie Sheeler
You loved that belly, Marc,
far more
than it ever loved you.
Despite your decorations
—despite the face of Marley, despite an array
of psychedelic patterns sheeting its bulk—
the ungrateful belly blinked out
your baby-faced heart among
the dust of ancient books and
naked floorplanks at the Strand.
Now, my wife is weeping at
her keyboard
and all the poets’ phones are ringing.
We’d like to see your day-glo middle
pushing one more time, like the prow of a cruise
ship,
through the swinging Pony doors or down
the dark steps of an aromatic restaurant on 6th
Street
for a post-reading meal among friends.
Even there, unmiked, the echo chamber of your voice
stirred the fragrant dinnertime air, turned
tourist heads and waiters’ heads: they all thought
we were crazy.
Like the time you recited an entire poem at the
blank
wooden Tiengarden table to that Flamenco-dancing
poet who never, thank God, came to our reading
again.
See? Already
you are relegated to anecdote.
But the diabetes was
supposed to do you in,
slowly, slowly, its sugary clamp distilling
dozens of poems as it took you down into
that Sweet Death world where
you
“can never have anything and never know why.”
Then the drinking with guys half your age
at all-night stand-up comedy raves would end,
and in their ending spawn more brilliant blocks
of text between the leather covers of your
notebooks.
Instead, your poems were abandoned in a backpack
at the bag check of a used-book store, that place
where all words go, sooner or later, to die.
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