PEOPLE DIE
(For Toni Morrison)
People Die
That is a fact.
But some people die and never leave
Walt Whitman still walks from Brooklyn to Manhattan
Taylor Mead still feeds stray cats on Ludlow St
Steve Dalachinsky is still running between gigs
now making collages out of actual sunsets
We will all die and we will all leave behind friends and family
To ponder the great mystery of where we have gone
Just as we have been left behind inconsolable and stunned
Sometimes I sit and stare at my books and other beautiful things
All writhing with memory
And I wonder
‘If it all burnt to a crisp
what would I remember?
what would I miss?’
Everything I own is the receptacle for a memory
for a meaning
That added up reminds me of who I am
Intrinsically of what I am
the palace of meaning I built and furnished inside myself
proof to me of my own evolution
A feather, a piece of colored glass, a small smooth stone
All have as much resonance as the photograph of a friend, a famous painting,
A statue I brought back from Crete that I could not afford then
Marty Matz famous poet, junkie and ner’ do well
Perhaps not in that order
when I asked him
“How do you want to be remembered?”
“Seriously?” he answered,
“Who is remembered?”
“How many people have been remembered in the past 1000 years?
A handful?”
“No.” he said,
“I will be remembered as long as there are people who remember me.”
I think about Dalachinsky now
The big obit in the New York Times
Like Ira Cohen a big acknowledgement
after he was dead
Nothing he could buy a meal with or pay his rent with
It is true that poets die every day
but it is also true that poets
artists
playwrights
musicians
starve to death
Every single day
Eating their insides out with worry
About the phone bill, the electric bill, the rent
Watching while the accolades, grants, awards get handed out
To people who are easier to get along with
And then when the problematic artist drops
we all realize the window into eternity they always were
And eternity itself pauses out of respect
And for days and weeks
we float like
empty Plastic bags
stirring inches from the ground
vacant and shiftless
When I visited my mother
In the handful of years before she died
I would walk thru the rooms of her house
While she was grocery shopping
And I would try to imagine
What it would feel like when she was dead and no longer there
Being a theatre person I guess it was natural for me to rehearse
Not that it helped when she actually died
her bedroom echoed her loss
Hard and rough Like a canyon bleak in winter
She was not sentimental in her leaving
Sometimes I imagine my good friends
in my apartment after I have died
Grumbling
“How many dead people’s apartments did she have to pack up?”
“She could have gotten rid of half of this stuff.”
And then someone says,
“But look how beautiful” and others more sympathetic
murmur
“Yes.”
Last month it happened for real
Suddenly I did not care about one thing I owned
I knew I could walk away
Outside my window the fattest pigeon I have ever seen
Struts the railing of my fire escape
Another clown
Another temporary visitor.
