—Vita brevis, ars longa
Life is brief, as Hippocrates wrote, and art is long,
yet Parra lived to one-hundred-&-four after writing
I take back everything I ever said at fifty-five. But I
differ with him and sought out his ghost.
Found him sitting cross-legged on nothing—electric
white hair crackling, unshaven, and in pajamas—
as he held an unlit Cuban cigar and tried to con me
to talk about Newtonian physics and how miserably
King Lear had aged. Impatient with his faint feints,
I interrupted his interruptions trying to explain
that even my feeble early poems, some existing in
perpetuity on the internet, when next to my newer
ones, show I may have improved over time. No whine
from me about the old old ones written in blood.
As I was explaining I'd told my children it was all right
to fail, Nicky—as he said he wished to be called—
interrupted again, shaking his cigar at me, said he was
sure that my words were all caca, and I was bat-shit
crazy if I didn't want to take them back. Then, instead of
tossing out a quote from Lear bewailing fate, he chose
Stephen Hawking: Look up at the stars, he advised me,
fading slowly from view, not down at your feet.
