My apologies from
the outset.
I have not managed to tame this poem,
these scattershot words masquerading as
art.
It started as a brief description
of an Italian man who carves a doll
for his granddaughter, freckled and five,
from a pine log found in the Apennines.
I grew distracted with that rhyme—
pine and Apennine—
and my mind wandered like an untethered
balloon.
Suddenly I was in St. Peter’s Square
listening to the Pope, who I think is the
cat’s pajamas,
as he spoke from the balcony to a gaggle
of nuns
and pilgrims who had come to find solace
in papal blessings and a carafe of chianti.
I was already in Italy,
so I went with the flow and kept writing.
My Spanish is ramshackle roughshod,
and my Italian never materialized
from the quantum field of linguistic
potential,
so my free verse ended in a poetic
cul-de-sac.
I entered a Vatican museum but stumbled
into Dan Brown, who positively insisted
that I hold up a mirror so he could
decipher
a seventeenth century manuscript on
pigeons,
naturally written backwards in Portuguese,
and thereby save his latest girlfriend
from being blown up by the Illuminati.
At this point, my legerdemain with words
failed,
and I decided that this poem
should be about a cat sunning himself in a
window.
He’s content to leave well enough alone.
I mean, William Carlos Williams wrote
that so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow
and chickens,
so why not a cat, sans pajamas, who
believes
that so much depends upon a warm windowsill?
~William Hammett
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