Said the Parakeet

              B.D. was a decent

poet but difficult

to define or for himself to self-divine,

a follower, a “gift” the way one seeker,

loose but selective,

identified himself

to an intoxication

reading obnubilating poems

in a brick-and-river town:

a generous, ecstatic overnight.

A present, or an absence

needing to be present, who tailed me,

who mailed women years ago when he

was free with his attention,

a fixation that he felt attended him.

               Sometimes several times a week

then several times a day

he’d write me, for he was free

to borrow books, go to the mailbox

at 3 a.m., for it was urgent that he send

a bride issue of Vogue, Bazaar,

(not Seventeen, but Glamour, but not Ms.)

from the Heartland where

(Don’t forget our wedding date!)

he bubble wrapped some trinkets, snapshots — 

poses of his parakeet beside his own long head

               meeting at an angle in a steely mirror.

His wife, from her wheelchair,

had made their camera flash.

He tried to kill his wife

with a little hammer,

the D.A. calling said. The D.A. asks

who are his friends; he cannot name

or call a single one. Define what

friendship saves your isolation from.

Detained, he clarifies for me:

It was a little hammer.

           His cursive changed to printing

turns to scribbling

before during after in the medical facility.

He isn’t a bad poet. A decent poet

and a bad carpenter, says Vonnegut

at dinner one free-and-easy evening in our town.

Some centuries go by

and on archival acid-free papyrus

or newfound stock of eco-friendly mulberry

               an American Greek Anthology:

a poem by B.D.,

and next to him one by Anonymous

influenced by somebody who influenced

anxiety in all of us.

My fragment says, She lived, who was his nail.

And she lived, unguarded, curiously

— by no one that she really knew — 

held very dear.