Around the first time
I began to see things, I heard
Miriam Makeba’s “Pata Pata” song,
raunchy and swinging out from my radio,
“Yi yo mama yiyomama,” come and get me, comeandgetme.
I asked her to appear,
but she declined, although mysteriously
I have heard the song many more times, almost whenever
I turn on the radio.
None of my women will appear, not the ones I love
and not the ones I fear. Not Emily Dickinson,
though she famously pays calls on friends
in her nightie and flip-flops.
Not Doris Day, though I offered to set her up nicely
in a station coffee shop with a fox fur collar
and a chrome tulip coupe of vanilla to poke at with a spoon.
So to myself alone I said:
“They will not come to you
because they are in you.
Neither will they beckon or instruct
except through this mouth.”