One morning I wake
not wanting to get out of bed,
and see a cloud
in my room.
“Mayakovsky?” I say.
“Find me some trousers!” he orders.
I scramble to the closet
and pull out a pair of jeans.
“Don’t know if these will fit,” I say.
“Of course they will!” he says.
“I’m a cloud!”
He puts them on and begins to look more like
himself, his cloudiness
assembling
into a column. “Don’t have much style, do you?”
he says. “Nevermind—
let us go out into the world and find ourselves
an ocean.” Before I
can object
he’s kicked me out the door
into the sunlight.
“Ah, just what I was looking for,”
he says, reaching up for the sun and fixing it
like a monocle
in his eye. “Now, poet,”
he laughs, slapping me on the back
and sending me flying
into some pines, “take me to your supermarket.”
I point him down the street—
rain leaks from his legs,
flame leaps from his eye,
and as we walk he floods and scorches, scorches and floods…
“Marvelous!” he cries.
“Your window-flashing automobiles!
Your torrent of engines!
But these buildings are ugly.”
I slow him down
by telling him about my problems in love.
“What will it be?” he says,
his face softening,
the floodtide letting up.
“Love or no-love?
And what kind of love:
big or minute?”
He grins and nudges me with a feathery elbow:
“Girls are partial to poets.”
We arrive at the supermarket,
where Mayakovsky
falls in love with the automatic doors.
He walks into the store over and over again,
each time announcing,
“But I—!”
The people in the cash register lines
drop their products.
Turning,
Mayakovsky bows and says,
“Ladies and Gentlemen,
I
present to you
Vladimir Mayakovsky: a Tragedy.”
One woman screams—
the rest smile and bat their eyelashes.
I grab a shopping cart
and Mayakovsky hops in.
We cruise through the aisles,
blackening the boxes.
“Look at all this food,” he says.
“Over there! The ocean.”
We roll into the frozen fish section,
slowing by freezer doors
so Mayakovsky can open and fog them
one by one.
He sees the lobster tank
and tells me to stop,
going silent
with concentration.
“This is how I feel, ” I say,
stooping. Calmly,
Mayakovsky tells me to move
on, then, once out of view of the lobsters, wheels
and says, “Stop moping!”
“But what’s the point?” I say.
“I’m not you—I’m just wasting my time.”
“You think you’re wasting your time?
You don’t know what it is
to waste time
until you’ve written a three-thousand line elegy
on the death of Lenin.
Try drawing posters
and championing boiled water
for a change.” I apologize
and he says, “Who can blame you for feeling
unproductive
with all these stores around?
Forget about them.
Sharpen yourself
on the edge
of your own decision.
“But what if nobody listens?” I ask.
“Hit them with hammer strokes
of metaphor
in stanzas like pistol points.
Make sure you sing.”
We pass the kitchen utensils
and Mayakovsky plucks
a long wooden spoon
from its rack, folds
a tuft of cloudfront
neatly back into a lapel,
and inserts the spoon
like a boutonniere.
“Now, let us find some women!”
he says, pointing to the produce section.
But then: “Never,
under any circumstances,
set your heel on the throat
of your own song.”
As we turn toward the tomatoes
the spoon shifts, revealing
the tiny, clean bullethole underneath.