Winter 1999
NOT QUITE THIRTEEN EXCUSES OF A PLAGIARIST
—after David Jones (a.k.a. David Sumner, etc.)
plagiarized an elegy Neal Bowers wrote for his father
—after wondering what Jones would possibly say
to explain himself
—with apologies to Wallace Stevens
I
After I read your poem,
those two white cups floated
out of the first stanza
and followed me everywhere.
Like sheets of paper,
they said, Fill me,
they said, One
is like the other.
II
Will it make you feel better
if I change my name
to Neal Bowers?
Ill
Your poem happened to be
underneath my paper
which happened to be
tracing paper, and the lamp
shone brighter, some kind of surge.
This is what I mean by
an accident of process.
IV
You’re not the only one
who had a father.
V
It was summer,
and I was lying on my back
looking for cloudy omens
when a plane
looped your poem in smoke.
I swear it.
VI
Listen, my parrot mimics
everything she hears, the rush
of traffic on the freeway
is the ocean, all houses
on my street are the same house,
I always ordered after
my cousin so the waitress
would bring two strawberry waffles
with whipped cream, solar panels
are leaves, and all sparrows fly
the same series of dips
and rises, and anyway,
they got the idea from waves.
VII
Your elegy touches me
like no other, so lovely,
and so, I wanted more
people to read it.
VIII
You’re not the only poet
I like.
IX
I opened my mail
one afternoon and a chain letter
demanded I steal your poem
or all living things
would die. And this
is how you thank me.
X
If you sit a monkey at a keyboard,
they say, eventually
Shakespeare will appear—
I got Bowers.
TIME CAPSULE
We introduced ourselves to the ground,
faces slapped and glazed
into impossible grins, we tangled letters
into words and left our hands
in a rip of sky.
Walking this playground now, I see
how we gathered around the fresh hole, here
where swings hang slack as headstones.
Did I say we? My hands?
They were his, that boy underneath
this dirt, this winter. I hold him
the way he held a marble
in sunlight, fingering the cold glass,
a swirl of green looking back—
the moment he stood here with the others
around the future, listening
to the shovels.
