Coit tower looms large over Broadway’s genteel
                Red light district. Sean Penn has parked in front of City
                Lights to buy a book for his son waiting in the front
                Seat of the Land Rover. Garlic infuses The Stinking
                Rose, leaks down the street where a seven-year-old
                Chinese girl skips across the crosswalk inhaling
                The 40-clove-of-garlic-chicken. Down the street in
                Chinatown my wife asks a woman in Cantonese
                If they kill and clean the pigeon and the guinea’s
                For you. When she was a child her mother would
                Bring home scorpion fish from the Hong Kong
                Street market and thump the bag on the floor
                Until the fish was dead. Is this how we will kill
                The live fowl? She tells me her elementary school
                Was built on a street next to the main television
                Station, her friends lining up to beg for autographs
                Which she thought stupid, as it is the audience
                That makes the image. “Who buys the tickets?” she asks,
                As if this fully explains her position.
                Then adds, “Why didn’t they ask me for my
                Autograph?” I pull a biography of Jules
                Verne of the shelf, dive into a passage about
                His favorite nephew’s attempt to kill him.
                The mad child wanted to make Jules famous,
                And assassination was his plan. Borges and Verne
                Were almost contemporaries and yet I can barely
                Imagine them in the same room at the same time.
                Borges thumping the floor with his Scorpion fish
                In a bag. And Verne, bullet lodged in his calf,
                Limping towards a war for peace. Last summer
                In the place where Starbucks meets Wang Wei on acid
                In the Heavenly Garden, I explained to C.D. Wright
                That I work on poems for years on end. Time, a filter.
                How else do I know if I really care
                About the piece unless it manages
                To persist? She thought that rather extreme
                And suggested a dose of Frank O’Hara.
                At dinner, the guinea fowl stinks of garlic paste.

Copyright © David Koehn, 2005. All Rights Reserved.