The Orthodox calendar on top of my refrigerator
tells me today is the feast of the Transfiguration
the point on the mountain where God and man meet
on such a radiant day and we’re
listening to a jazz band in Lincoln Park
on the kind of night you only see in the movies where
the young man and his love interest take their first tentative steps
toward what we all know will be a tragic ending to
their summer corn sweet love story (don’t they all, though)
and Steve shows us pictures on his cell phone of
Charlie Parker’s gravestone in Kansas City where he first met
him
none of us knew, yet, that bear of a man
you never forget who I met
only once on a night when California was rising and
we were all eager students of the multiversed mahatma
at an advanced workshop on carma bumming
in Literary Café backrooms
but today, when the liberation of Paris began and
(you’d really love this) Ogden Nash and
Philo T. Farnsworth and (even) Gene Roddenberry were all born
you, our cracked universe’s scholar-in-residence, town crier, outlaw prankster,
you leave us on the day (and you’d really love this)
the day Groucho Marx died.
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