This is a poem I've been working on in the last couple of months.
It's called Bootleg Chekhov.
And the reference to check off, if you know Chekhov's stories,
I think be clarified at the end of the poem,
if you don't know them it won't be.
But in any case, it doesn't make any difference.
Bootleg Chekhov.
He had the tact--
I should say, vernaccia is a kind of Italian wine.
He had the tact left to nurse the vernaccia, now two
glasses down already.
And him sitting among friends like he'd
parked a heavy waxy brown paper sack on his lap.
But who saw it, invisible and crammed with letters?
So he thought his sullen father unshaven, dreamed of
would have to be summoned to haul it away.
The letters accused him of not being what he wanted
and being what he was.
If he read them out loud, the other men and women
would know why he sat with them drinking and pretending
this was a canal town.
The midge phased water, the cafe deck of teak.
That perfume the waitress wore on her neck
or under a wristwatch.
He tried to make something useful of it all.
He took up the style the spiders call s"itting still inside
ourselves" as they sat inside the silk wisps spun from
their bellies around him.
The men and women went on chatting who weren't married,
or not at least to each other.
They drank out of the blowsy astonished pink begonia
swaying in the breeze that night.
He made a bride entering her house newly built
in a vineyard that might thrive for years.
Though cold mist on the hillsides
hostaged some other nights, some nights worrisome souring.
But hey, hello, none of these people
were married nor would be.
They would never even touch each other
as one might hope in bed or behind some loud funked
out club lit by strobes or in a bower.
And if they had, would they have recovered spontaneously
from their childhoods spent with strict and jealous gods?
We believe in so little or too much.
Lonely, unlonely wavelets on a copper beach.
Brain waves, the whistling we do.
Birds in dark, thick bushes.