you kept coming up with “ape” in past
life regression, disappointed cuz you
wanted to have been in a royal court,
and I stared at your too-small Willy Wonka
t-shirt and told you I started my dissertation
on him before I was abducted by
Persephone, who suckered me in by
giving me a seductive low-five
and I spent seven years in that strange land, seven
years while outside were your turmoils and
so-called wars, pouring over tomes of salvage
law – never a salvor, nor a salvee be –
and Mr. Porteous, the self-shackled librarian,
was so kind, even though he smelled like A-1
steak sauce,
later we came upon a fifteenth-
century ostrich egg (which I remembered
being) and Porteous went on about a
polyphonist he’d bumped into at the general
store and how they’d been crowded in
by a parade of horribles, and everywhere you
turned seemed to be the music of Darius Milhaud,
and I settled into a routine, seeing Withstandley
in the morning, notwithstanding, feeding me my
mueslix, and when I came upon the doctrine of
mootness, I was somehow freed
and that’s how this past dug me up. . .
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