CPL

 

I thought I was really something

When I got a call from

The Connecticut Poet Laureate.

I bragged about it to an old girlfriend

When I was drunk at a high school reunion.

Then he called me again a little later

When I was supposed to be reading

The Lord of the Rings to my kids.

 

After that his calls came once a week.

I told him I thought writing poems

Was compulsive like gambling,

That I wished I could stop.

He wasn’t listening.

He was thinking about

The next poem he was going

To read to me or whether

He’d remembered to ask

If I’d gotten him a reading in NC yet.

 

I knew all his poems,

But I was disappointed

In how he read them,

And I had tried to schedule a reading

But no one else was impressed

By the Connecticut Poet Laureate

No matter how much I built him up.

 

This went on for seven or eight years.

Sometimes my oldest son

Would answer the phone

And tell him I wasn’t at home

Or we would let the call go

To the brand new answering machine,

And listen to him read a poem

Or talk about how much the Mohawks

In upper state New York loved him.

Then he would stop because

He didn’t really know

What to say to a machine.

 

The Connecticut Poet Laureate

Went for a while without calling

And I wondered if he was okay.

Then he made a New Year’s call,

Just after the Bush-Gore

Supreme Court election.

He hated republicans

And made sure to tell me so.

He’d lost weight, quit drinking,

And felt the best ever,

Except about that

Goddamn election.

We are in some shit now

He told me.

Just wait and see.

I agreed and agreed and agreed.

 

A week later another friend

Who also knew him called

And said he’d died,

Heart attack caused by

The election.

The tedious conversations were over.

The nasal Yankee voice.

The violent coughing fits,

The thirty minute soliloquies.

 

I tried to remember

If I’d ever told him

That his poems saved me

When I was in my 20s,

That he was a genius,

And everything he thought he was.

I don’t think I did.

 

My brush with the aggravating

Nearly famous was over,

And I already missed him terribly.

Every time the phone would ring,

I’d sigh, then think, well,

If anybody could do it,

It would be the Connecticut Poet Laureate.