It Occurred To Me

Simic was following me.
He’d been to the pub and sat in my booth,
wore my pants, played darts with a tarot card reader
he’d married in New Mexico.

He had no face--just an old shoe there.
His scarf was wrapped around his shoe-head
and his glasses flew into my hand like a bird.

“What if you ran into yourself
on the street,” he said.“And thought
that they deserved
just a little bit of suffering?”

He was in a blue tuxedo; a frog in his pocket muttered the alphabet.

He goes on to tell me
how he’d been busy spooning poached pears
into my mother’s mouth:

(“She’s circling dimensia,” he said. “She talks to cremated things.”)

and how my father’d left his
teeth in a Tennessee courtroom.

How did he find them? I thought.
He makes all of the dandelions molt…

“Hocus pocus,” he says and inserts six or seven maraschino cherries
into his mouth. “Fly to the beach. You bite so sensually.”