Michael Hathaway

Letting Go

Dear Robert Cooperman,
I spilled coffee on your poems.
It wasn’t just: la la la, sitting at the desk,
drinking coffee, opening mail,
& oops! spilled coffee all over the manuscripts!
No, it had to be like this:
my aunt died –
my aunt who was really my mom
since her big sister died 15 years ago to the day.
We are in the process of clearing out her house,
my brother, sister, and I.
It’s just across the street from my house.
On Saturday mornings, I loved to roll out of bed,
stumble over to her house with my coffee,
watch In the Heat of the Night with her,
play with her rambunctious kittens.
More often than not, she’d make breakfast.
She kept a big bowl of peanut M&Ms on the kitchen table for me.
I wasn’t supposed to have them, but we reasoned
the protein in the peanuts balanced the sugar in the chocolate.
That bowl was never empty.
Did I already say she was more than an aunt?
That she was my neighbor and best friend
who helped generously and often with kitty & Chiron chores;
that every time I look across the street at her empty house
it’s like a punch in the gut?
She loved pink flamingos. In my Florida travels,
I bought her kitschy pink flamingo souvenirs and post cards
for taking care of my super-sized clowder while I was gone.
She left eight cats, so now I have eight more cats –
eight promises are eight promises.
So, it was a Saturday morning, eight days after her death.
I stumbled out to get the mail,
clutching my grown-up sippy-cup of coffee.
I grabbed the mail from the box, it included your poetry submission.
I spied the two pink flamingos that adorned my aunt’s front yard,
looking so forlorn and all askew from the Kansas wind,
and decided it was time to bring them home.
I crossed the street and stupidly stuffed the cup of coffee & mail
in my big parka pocket together.
One of the flamingo’s wire legs was missing.
As I remember it, I leaned to look for the all-important piece of wire
and stumbled to my knees and felt the coffee spill in my pocket.
An on-looker might have said, “That guy was just standing there,
staring down at some cheap-ass plastic pink flamingos
and his knees just buckled!”
That was how I spilled coffee all over a poetry submission
for the first time in 33 years, and Bob, I was so sorry,
I knelt at those flamingos and just cried.

Going Down

The Gypsy Girl, Frans Hals, 1628, Louvre Museum

Twenty-five years ago
I fell in love with The Gypsy Girl,
a framed print in a local flea market.
It was $70, a lot of money to the unemployed.
The owner let me pay it off in installments.

The Gypsy Girl’s beatific expression
and impish grin reminded me of
my best childhood friend, Julie.

Tonight, I learned the girl who modeled
for Hals was a prostitute.

I’m glad she had that time,
a time she didn’t have to perform
any degrading deed on any strangers,
any gross, horny old goats.

Her job was simply to be herself,
to be exquisite,
to go down
in history.

Epitaph

For God’s sake
don’t inscribe this on my tombstone,
“Rest in Peace” or “Be with Jesus.”

Inscribe this: “He learned to love
in spite of Christians, Republicans
and rednecks.”

Inscribe: “He knew how it felt
to trip over his stupid heart,
to fall flat on his face,
to lie in quiet contentment all night
beside the man he loved.”

Inscribe: “He learned to feel joy without shame.”

 

Michael Hathaway works by day as a mild-mannered museum curator, and by night publishes Chiron Review literary magazine, which he founded in 1982. His latest books are Talking to Squirrels and Postmarked Home: New and Selected Poems 1979-2019, both available from Amazon and B&N.