~ Delta Poetry Review ~

David Kirby

Don’t Go Crazy on Me

                        “Why do I always get the broken stuff?” says my niece 

            as she opens a present on Christmas morning and a bunch

of broken stuff falls out, to which I’d say, there are three 

                        answers to your question, Margaret, the first being that you 

            do not always get the broken stuff. The second answer 

is that everybody always gets the broken stuff, every time.

                        The third answer comes from the Buddha, who would tell 

                        you that you are not the one who always gets the broken 

            stuff because there is no you. If you go around thinking 

there’s a you, you—or the person who thinks you are you 

                        and who will be hereafter referred to as “you” in the interest 

            of grammatical if not ontological clarity—are just going to 

find yourself in a sea of troubles, as Hamlet said, and look 

                        what happened to him. Or look what happened to Francesco 

                        de’ Pazzi, one of the conspirators who tried to assassinate

            the Medici brothers one morning in 1478 and take

control of the Florentine government but succeeded only

                        in wounding himself grievously in the thigh as he laid

            about to this side and that in what one observer called

“an ecstasy of stabbing” and was later executed when

                        the plot failed. Probably could have hotfooted it

                        to Arezzo or Settignano and holed up in the hills

            if he hadn’t wounded himself grievously in the thigh

during that ecstasy of stabbing, but no: 

                        Francesco de’ Pazzi’s problem is that he thought 

            he was somebody, somebody better than all those Medicis, 

who were actually a pretty decent bunch of folks, 

                        say historians, and who would have been much missed 

                        by the Florentine populace if Francesco and the other Pazzis 

            had succeeded in killing and replacing them 

and inevitably been killed and replaced themselves,

                        not that you have to be a bat-shit crazy member 

            of the Italian nobility to make and implement plans 

that don’t work. During the British rule in India,

                        the government became concerned about the number 

                        of venomous cobras in Delhi and so offered a bounty 

            for every dead cobra the locals brought in. Good idea!

For about a week: initially, large numbers of snakes 

                        were killed for the reward, but eventually, enterprising 

            Indians began to breed cobras for the extra income,

and Delhi found itself surrounded by cobra farms.

                        Naturally the Brits said nix on those tricks, Indians,

                        but when they scrapped the reward program, the cobra 

            breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, 

whereupon the cobra population mushroomed, which wasn’t

                        exactly the outcome the monocle-and-muttonchop

            set was hoping for. Okay, now that we’ve covered

the dumb shit that misguided political entities are

                        capable of, it’s time to move on to the mistakes

                        otherwise well-intentioned people have made

            at the individual level, beginning with Upton Sinclair,

whose 1906 meatpacking industry exposé The Jungle 

                        was intended, in its author’s words, to expose "the inferno 

            of exploitation” of the typical American factory worker 

at the turn of the 20th Century, but the reading public 

                        fixed instead on food safety as the novel's theme, 

                        seeing as how they were outraged by their discovery

            that old sausage rejected by European markets

was being returned white and moldy but then doused

                        with borax and glycerine and dumped into hoppers

            and once more ground into sausage that would be

served, not to little Sven and Katerina and Gustave,

                        but to Travis and Peggy and Buster. And Ricky.

                        Yum! Now I’m beginning to think that this particular form

            of self-deception is limited to authors, because

I just learned that Louisa May Alcott published more 

                        than thirty “dime novels” under the name A.M. Barnard,

            because, as she wrote to her friend Alfred Whitman,

“I intend to illuminate [the reading public] with a blood 

                        and thunder tale as they are easy to ‘compoze’ 

                        and are better paid than the moral and elaborate works 

            of Shakespeare, so don’t be shocked if I send you 

a paper containing a picture of Indians, pirates, wolves, 

                        bears and distressed damsels in a grand tableau 

            over a title like this: The Maniac Bride or The Bath 

of Blood, A Thrilling Tale of Passion.” Well—

                        stupid Louisa! Who reads The Maniac Bride today?

                        Probably not even you, since you never wrote it.

            Instead you wrote Little Women and its numerous

sequels, which, though more difficult to “compoze,”

                        earned you a jillion dollars or eighty jillion

            in today’s money. Probably she just did it

instead of thinking about it all the time,

                        which never helps: on August 7, 1954, two men 

                        who had broken the four-minute mile separately, 

            John Landy and Roger Bannister, raced each other,

during which contest Bannister stormed by Landy 

                        and won in 3:58.8 while Landy came in second 

            in 3:59.6. Landy was .8 seconds slower, which is

.8 seconds in today’s seconds. Years later, Landy said, 

                        “I keep running that race on the theory that if I rerun it 

                        a thousand times, the results will at least once be reversed, 

            but it hasn’t happened yet.” No, John Landy, no!

Go sit in the corner with Louisa May Alcott!

                        Your only chance at happiness is to live your life

            the way Gabriel García Márquez lived his:

when he was writing Love in the Time of Cholera,

                        says Márquez, he would “get up at 5:30 or 6 in the morning.

                        Someone would arrive at the house with fresh fish 

            or lobster or shrimp caught nearby. Then I would write 

from 8 till 1. By midday, Mercedes would go to the beach 

                        and wait for me with friends. I never quite knew who 

            to expect; there were always people coming and going. 

After lunch I had a little siesta. And when the sun started 

                        going down I would go out on the street to look for places 

                        where my characters would go, to talk to people 

            and pick up language and atmosphere, so the next morning 

I would have fresh material I had brought from the streets.”

                        Who’s Mercedes? Who cares. Obviously a woman

            he loved and lived with and, if he ever complained

about always getting the broken stuff, told him no, 

                        he didn’t. See? That’s the way you do it. 

                        You don’t sit around fretting over the injustices

            you believe to be heaped on the you who doesn’t exist

in the first, you just do stuff. And good stuff, too: write,

                        buy local seafood, see your friends, come up behind

            Mercedes and put your arms around her waist

and tell her you love her. Don’t be like those others!

                        Remember, pazzi means “crazy people” in Italian.

Seattle Residents Baffled by Bright Object in Sky

“Others called the Fire Department, even though it was the sky that was on fire.

They had to call somebody.”

                                                            The New York Times Magazine, April 18, 2021.

It’s just a rocket, its parts ablaze,

but it’s a comet to some, a meteor shower to others.

To many, it’s a fleet of alien starships,

sailing past us because our airport is too small.

Some glance up and go their way,

late for work already or taking a child to the ER.

What they all see are themselves:                  

rational, thrilled, too busy to care.

Some call the Fire Department,

even though it’s the sky that’s on fire.

At the other end of the line, the dispatcher

says What is your name and What is your location

and Tell me exactly what happened and then

Now you belong to the heavens.

David Kirby teaches at Florida State University. He is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement described as “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense” and which was named one of Booklist’s Top 10 Black History Non-Fiction Books of 2010. Entertainment Weekly has called Kirby’s poetry one of “5 Reasons to Live.” In 2016, Kirby received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Florida Humanities, which called him "a literary treasure of our state."