NED DISCUSSES BECKETT IN KEY WEST

KEY WEST: DISCUSSING BECKETT

We’ve been to see Krapp’s Last Tape,
director, a friend from Zimbabwe,
which used to be called Rhodesia.
We have brought drinks to the swimming pool.
My wife and I sit at the edge of the pool
dangling our feet into the water.
My mother-in-law wants to know
what it means.
Krapp’s Last Tape.
Is Krapp going to die?
Is there a disease?
Is he getting ready
to kill himself?
I suggest the meaning is
there is no meaning.
After Krapp slips on the banana peel
and the soliloquies begin on the tape recorder,
there is no plot.
My wife and her mother insist
that bearded men from India,
who own collections of Rolls Royces,
know that there are truths hidden
in every microscopic breath of air.
The details aren’t clear yet,
but progress is being made.

It is quiet by the pool.
The Palmetto bugs
like the cut limes and quinine water
but let the humans have the gin.
Not far away there exist
The sounds of the semi-tropic night.
Drunken tourists exit the closing bars,
tomorrow a sick breakfast and then the beach.
The moaners squat in alleyways
against the sides of buildings
and know without being told
that Key West, Caya Hueso,
means Island of Bones.


The scene changes for no reason,
We are living in Long Island.
It is winter and the days are gray and short.
We are trying to be domestic,
with two new children.
The director calls from Key West.
He has tested positive.
The director,
Caucasian blond,
born in what used to be Rhodesia,
living on the edge of America
in Key West,
once said he was thinking of
changing his own name to Zimbabwe,
dead in four months.

SOME PLACES I’VE DRIVEN FROM

The land here lies flat beneath the sky.
Any mountains will be supplied
by memory. Some places leave you

wrapped in ribbons. In others
you lay open. It is all much the same.
Innocent roads have claimed many lives.

Not far from here there’s a cemetery
full of poets. In the morning
we sit on the patio and drink coffee

spiked with last night’s argument.
The fat man mows the lawn. He’s already
grumbled politics and there’s nothing

left to do but cut the grass. We agree,
there’s hardly ever an escape. I lay
my book on my lap and think road.

MEMENTO MORI

I have lusted after pensions,
inhabited guilty offices,
and numbered innocent people.
I have woken at night
to hear my pinstripes moaning.
I have commuted without mercy,
I have clutched my stomach,
I have had my shoes polished.

Green birds have wept without me.
Tailors have measured me and laughed.
Corporations have collected
My urine and tested me for lies.
Musicians have understood much
that has escaped my grasp.
Priests have blessed me
and worried about their wine.

Telephones have pursued me into subways.
I have bored people
with interesting scientific theories.
Computer programs have shown me
to be mistaken many times.
I have thought myself into abandoned buildings
and scattered ancestral photographs
like dried leaves around my feet.