The Poet and I

November 9, 1953, St. Vincent's Hospital, New York City, the body of a bard blued, more bile than bone after 18 straight whiskies. In photographs, Dylan Thomas is a light-faced European in a tweed suit jacket, wavy hair, sinking eyes, and the whale of a scowl with a cigarette's smoke spiral. He had a wife. He had lovers. He had two sons and one daughter. Dead 30 years before I was born to my mother. Today, I skip and trip maplessly through his circle city, a brined boot tour through hooks and netted metaphor. At 32, I'd like to soak his paper poems in my beef and carrot stew, let them sog, let them sink, a capsized crew. 

Were we to sit in the shallow ditches of a cafe's worn wooden benches, sipping coffees, dipping cookies, he'd see me speaking quickly and grossly optimistically, tipsy from the caffeine of little green beans. Maybe he'd slip nips of whiskey into his cup or scratch poems inside the ring stains on the tabletop....coffins, wombs, weather, salt-footed sea birds, fish fetor... If I overdosed on coffee as he supposedly died from whiskey (18 shots of espresso with milk frothy as carnival candy), I'd chug from my black bottomed mug, words spitting, rambling into a damn near trampling. 

Oh how I'd spin into an ugly oblivian. 

Back in reality, I gather groceries: one dozen eggs, a tin can of soft orange squash, apples, diapers, raspberries, coffee beans, and a carton of heavy whipping cream. I'm making pie for my birthday night. One avocado, organic purple onions, blackberries, breaded chicken breasts, green leaf lettuce. I am no Dylan Thomas, no doomed poet living by the sea from the first half of the 19th century. His death day is my birthday, but I am clean of cigarette soot, free from bottles of ripe scotch or the desire to be some dirty crook. I am happy and sappy and loved and in love and in love with love. My heart harbors no home, bakes no feast for the heaviest, hungriest of fragile beasts. I am simple and plain, obscure as a drop of rain. My problems are as small as the mice in the walls. So why would I ever tease tragedy with 18 straight whiskies?