Parnassus

By Jason Primm

for Jim Tolan

Dear Jim, here’s a line
you’d hate, Cobble Hill
become Parnassus.
You’d start slow
and gain speed, Christ,
did you ride to meet me
in a chariot? Did my alarm
wake me in the nineteenth
century? Did you invent
a time machine and go back
and kill Eliot and Williams
and Frost? Forgive me;
it is because you died.
I’m not the only one
in this room full of poets
writing in my head
on a cold spring day
in Brooklyn.
It’s this stately chamber
in a honeycomb of death.
It’s the untimeliness.
It’s your widow
and tall son reminding
that life is bigger, that
poetry serves something
other than poetry.
It’s not having a notebook
or a laptop so the words
remain unused and luminous.
It’s the new silence
around you, my most
outspoken of friends.
In the same way
I think you can’t know
the weather or that the room
is so full that people lean
against the front window
under the gold letters,
I think you can read
these lines we compose.
They float above
the lugubrious
flowers and patterned
wallpaper. They cling
to the tin stamped ceiling.
I imagine you walking
the aisle and picking
the lines like fruit,
spitting out the trite,
savoring the ones without pity.

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Jason Primm pursues modest goals in a coastal city. His fiction and poetry have most recently appeared in Sweet Tree Review, Windmill, The Atticus Review, and The Breakwater Review. He maintains a blog at jasonprimm.wordpress.com.