~ Delta Poetry Review ~
David Kirby
Baby Exchanging Station
Upon the reading of
his death warrant, he remarked, “I see that you have made three
spelling mistakes.
First thing I thought when I read that
is
that is so me,
the second
being that the Marquis’s sarcasm made little
or no difference to the
scaffold-and-gibbet crew since
they knew
they were going to chop his head off anyway,
and therefore we might as well just be
ourselves
right up to the very last, seeing as
how we don’t have
any choice.
Who are we, really? Barbara and I go to
Birmingham one winter to visit our
friends Michael
and Phyllis
and stay at their big dark scary house,
during which visit Barbara goes out
with Michael
and Phyllis while I stay in their big
dark house
for reasons
I no longer remember, and I am wearing
a green cable-knit sweater and jeans
and boots,
and I’m
wandering around and picking up one thing
or another and looking at it and
putting it down again
and then walking over to one window or
another
and looking
out of it when suddenly I hear a footstep
behind me and then someone saying
David in a long
slow whisper
and turn to see someone roughly my height
and general body type with hair the
color of mine
and even parted the same way and
wearing a green
cable-knit
sweater and jeans and boots, and I say
Holy hell as he takes a step
toward and says
Daaviid
again,
only slower
this time, and for a second I think
of my high-school classmate Mike
Hanlon whose
father died, and at the funeral I
asked Mike how
his mother
was doing, and Mike shook his head and said
Man, she doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind,
which
is a hell of
a thing to say about your mom, though it’s
the way I felt as well until the guy
who’d whispered my name
laughed and held out his hand and said
Hey, just kidding—
I’m George, Michael and Phyllis’s friend. Turns out
he lived just a block away and was a
dead ringer for
yours truly,
so they told him what to wear and when
they’d be going out with Barbara and
gave him their key.
We had a chuckle and went into the
kitchen for a beer,
and I went
back to being whoever I thought of as myself,
and the others returned, more pleased
with themselves than
they should
have been. On the drive back to Tallahassee,
Barbara and I stop at this one rest
area, and the baby
changing station in the men’s room is
labeled
Baby
Changing Station
except that someone has not only used
a Magic Marker to make it
Baby
Exchanging Station
but done so
in that creepy font they used in fifties horror
movie posters that say THE GRAVE
COULDN’T
HOLD IT! and MONSTER ESCAPES! Maybe
each
of us is
somebody else and doesn’t know it. Or maybe
we are like Pelé, who said that he was
puzzled by
the fact
that he was both Pelé, the greatest sports legend
of the 20th century, but he had been
born and still was
Edson Arantes do Nascimento, the
ordinary guy
whose job it
was to watch over Pelé and shoulder
his godlike existence. At his death,
Pelé wondered,
who will
die, the demigod incarnate or the simple
creature at his side?
Only
God can tell me, he thinks,
and so I must meet him face to face,
and at this point
I am
imagining myself as the protagonist in a home movie
who has had a life in which the little
things added up—
paying for a
draft beer or a movie ticket, seeing the word
casalinga in the window of an
Italian restaurant—
and my teams won a lot of their games
if not all,
and a lot of the books I read
(but not all) were so good
that I couldn’t wait to pick them up
again, and I enjoyed
good health,
at least till now, and then I cough
a few times and things go dark, and
then the lights
come on again, and look, there’s the
gate to Heaven,
and on the
other side I can see people playing games
in a meadow and listening to beautiful
music and bringing
each other
plates of food that look absolutely delicious,
only there are these guards out front
who look really mean,
but I make my way to the front of the
line anyway,
and as I do,
it seems as though most of the people
are getting in, though from time to
time the head guard
looks up and
locks eyes with someone, and then poof,
they’re gone, just like that, and
finally I’m right
in front of him, and he says,
ID?
and I hand it over,
and he
checks it against the entry in his big book
as I look over his shoulder and
suddenly I say,
There! That’s me, all right! See? There’s my name!
No way I’d say,
Come
on, brother, you misspelled it.
Lines Composed in Defense of American Womanhood While Waiting in
Line at Popeye’s
The French love lobsters more than we
do, or at least
they think
of them as something other than a source
of meat that is admittedly delicious
when boiled,
broiled,
steamed, grilled, or poached in butter and then
consumed as is or made into a risotto
or a lobster salad
which, when
stuffed into a hot dog bun and served
alongside the potato chips whose
crispness nicely
complements the velvety texture of the
salad itself,
makes a mere
roll
into a
lobster
roll. French Romantic
poet Gérard de Nerval had a pet
lobster which he walked
at the end
of a blue silk ribbon in the courtyard
of the Palais-Royal in Paris, saying,
when others
expressed wonderment,
Why should a lobster
be any more ridiculous than a dog? I have a liking
for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures.
They know the secrets of the sea, they don’t bark,
and they don’t gnaw upon one’s privacy
as dogs do.
The secrets
of the sea: what are those? That all
is change, perhaps, that the tide
comes in and goes out
as well, and
that several times a day. I was in Paris myself
last month, not at the Palais-Royal
but the Grand Palais,
and found myself before Abraham
Janssens’ painting
“Inconstancy, or The Fickleness of Love, ” which depicts
a bosomy woman holding the moon in one
hand
as she
caresses, that’s right, a lobster with the other,
the idea being that, as the little
text next to the painting
explains, because women are
juicier than
men,
they are more susceptible to the tidal
pull of the moon
and therefore more unstable and prone
to infidelity,
an idea
reinforced by the lobster, whose movement
from side to side also suggests
inconstancy.
Okay, sounds
nutty to me, too. However, seeing
an opportunity for a lively
discussion, I stationed myself
next to the
painting for fifteen minutes or so and waited
for people to approach and look at it
and read the little text
or, if they didn’t, directed them to
the little text
and waited
for them to read it and then asked them
what they thought. Every man agreed,
usually
with a smile
and a what-else-do-you-expect shrug.
To my surprise, though, most of the
women felt
the same
way. Remember, this is France.
When it comes to matters of the heart,
surely
the women of my own country are more
focused
and
resolute, more committed to the sanctity
of their relationships than their
French sisters.
I’m back
home in Tallahassee and waiting in line at Popeye’s,
and my order is taking forever, and
when I say
as much
under my breath, or at least I think
it’s under my breath, the man in front
of me says,
I’ve been here twenty minutes, and
I say,
You must
be starving,
and he says,
It ain’t that. My wife’s
getting off work, and she’s gonna drive by here
any minute,
and I say,
Yeah? and
he says, If she
sees my car in the parking lot, she’s
gonna kill
my ass,
and I say,
Oh, dear—I hope not!
and he says,
Kill it good. Sounds like true
love, doesn’t it?
David Kirby teaches at
Florida State University. His latest books are a poetry collection,
The Winter Dance Party, Poems
1983–2023,
and a textbook modestly entitled
The
Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them.
Kirby 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. He is currently on the board of Alice
James Books.
| Archive | Submissions | About | News |