IN THE PARK WITH BIRD
I’m old enough to understand what my father told me
about making do with what you’ve got except he never
told me that, instead he said get off your ass and do something,
you’ll never amount to squat, do something to better yourself
the way I showed you, except he never showed me anything,
all talk of God and flying saucers and the way the Earth
rolls from side to side and any minute could fall out of orbit—
excuse me while I blow my nose on my napkin with
Made Today Gone Tomorrow on one side, and on the other
Waste Not Want Not and We Give Anything Left Over
At Day’s End To The Poor. “Good on them,” I say between
sneezes. I try to do the same thing. I never want to see
anyone suffer or go hungry the way I have. I once saw a dog
in the park eating its own waste while I waited for my next fix
or the means to effect same near where Charlie Parker lived
and practiced his scales, if scales you could call them, sequences,
sequined bumps and colored squeaks that called us over when
I was too young to pay much mind and shouldn’t have been
in the park anyway, so close to the river, closed with chains
that encouraged us to cut or climb over, and the sounds
were not natural, far from, more like a tree being cut down
with a jackhammer tuned to the key of see-if-I-care and
I cared so much that I couldn’t get closer to junkies in heaven,
heads in the ground-ivy, watched by the eyes of mice,
some believing they weren’t anywhere or were Charlie himself
swirling, swarming, swopping to pick up where he never
left off, playing bridges and “Cherokee,” here where some trees
are three, four hundred years old from when this was a swamp
beside which Indians had a village—Bird’s mother was Choctaw—
and one tree was later used to hang people, or at least make them
think twice, miscreants with few choices from when choice
was not an issue, but how many today even know what
a sax is, or even care, still I’ll take you over to the geezers by
the chess tables who claim to be Comanche or Quechua,
and one who despite all the evidence claims to be Joe Two Trees,
last of his tribe from Weckquaeskeg in the Bronx, who
with his horn has taken over a ghostly corner of what he calls
Bird Land, saying that he, like Charlie, is chiral and cannot
be brought to coincide with himself and claims his mushrooms
aren’t mushrooms but Jesus who is passed around and eaten
in a white tipi facing east, and who tells me “Rock-a-bye-baby”
is an Algonquian lullaby from when mothers hung their cradles
from a tree just like the one we’re under. “Charlie was my brother,”
he says. “I’d build him a home and take care of him.” “Dizzy
said that,” I say. “No way,” he says. “Dizzy long gone.”
