Failed Experiment, and: Meant to Be

Failed Experiment

Better to be a big fish in a little pond,so he moves into the countryto a town of a few people.Little does he know they are all of them poets,that the first has written a biographyof you-know-who,and the second, the definitive analysisof the most important one since,and that they all write poems,beautiful little lyricsthat they paint on their doorsand above their closetsand have tattooed across the buttocks—painfully moving and intense—so that he is, in reality, a very little fishin an incredibly little pond,more like plankton, really,or plankter, to use the singular.

Meant to Be

I was conceived beneath the cherry blossomsduring the Carter admin. My fatherwas heavily into postwar Polishpoetry at the time, and my motherhad just spent several long, dark months lost inThe Cantos. Every other night throughoutthe pregnancy a close-knit group of friendswould stop at the front door and sing lines ofancient Chinese poetry to the quaintnotes of a lute that a neighbor boywas always plucking. My grandmother threatenedto disown my mother if, boy or girl,she didn't name me Rumi. Grandma saidthe name could go either way. My grandfatherwanted Sharon, after Sharon Olds, which healso claimed could go either way. She wasa relatively new poet back thenand he expected great things. My othergrandparents were dead. They had been murderedwalking to their car after a Ginsbergreading. The deed was done by a group ofthespian street thugs who said a long workby Aeschylus made them do it. Asked atthe funeral to regale the mourners,my aunt could merely whisper a line or two:Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.    Shantih shantih shantihDuring my delivery my parentshired an actor to read Charles Simic'shit collection Classic Ballroom Dances.The story goes my head began to crownright between the poems "Prodigy" and"Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators."