After a conversation with P.Z.
The phone call came on a night of a bruising
battle with my computer, writhing out some
scalding word-art. It was from a man who
claimed to be the “King of Poetry.”
His first words were: “Are you beauty who
wants to be true?” And I thought, sure, why not?
People have said worse.
“I am king because I understand
eternal harmony with infinite beauty,”
he continued. And who was I to argue?
“Truth cannot be against the lie; the lie
is against the truth.” I was with him so far.
Then he spoke about Eva, a perfect
poet, he claimed, “an angel born for it,”
and how she was “incarnate ecstasy,
light of the absolute.” He kept on
with reminisces, fragments,
and epiphanies, including one about
a seven-year-old Mexican girl
he spotted from a fire escape in Pilsen:
“They will kill her before she is 17,”
he declared. And I agreed—this, too, is true.
He talked about writing a book for the
universal child, how he had eclipsed
his Italian background to be human,
and how those youth in jail “love death to be
with the dead ones who can’t hurt them.”
He appeared to surpass even this,
the real, the cold, the brutal
tongues licking us to sleep. Here was a Dante
for our times, whose mythical Eva
rouses poetry from its quilted slumber.
Here was a concrete Buddha challenging
even me to drink from the chalice of my own gifts. “
You are on your knees—stand up!” he yelled
before hanging up, his words like wings to cross
the battered skies of all illiteracies.