Word count: 745
Paragraphs: 13
everything is covered in ink
your fingers
everything
they touch
your shirt pocket
your whiskers
cosmo’s fur
the whole world you’d have be
covered
in ink
Neeli couldn’t go anywhere without leaving his prints everywhere. He left so many, the authorities couldn’t make sense of them. So they’d round up the usual suspects, put them in a line and expect the public to choose. Typecast, all of them. Meanwhile, Neeli’d go on about the magpie business of the poem, thumb his nose, like a wild hare, hitchhiking to eternity, where the authors await him—Jack, Diane, David, Bob, Hank, and a hundred-thousand more.
He’d been headed there all along, however much he might’ve doubted the way, lacking adequate affirmation, as we do. There are no maps. Who knows when the ride will end, at what rest stop it’ll leave us, at the side of what road we’ll have to wait for the next wind-blown bucket or Mercedes-Benz to pick us up and carry us on. All we can do is put our thumb out and smear the air with ink, like coal or ore dust, like Neeli did, everyday.
*
it’s stopped raining
three a.m.
and the polyglot night
bird won’t shut up
just keeps singing
so damn sweetly
we can’t sleep
head into the kitchen
for the last of the wine
something to eat
it’s black out
wine’s black as ink
there’s ink on the grapes
*
Food for thought. Neeli Cherry. He liked to say we understood each other because we were booksellers’s sons. As he prepared a lunch of little things, keeping time in his own way, with his idiosynchronos tick, that sudden shaggy nod. Another second helping? Might as well have been dining out, al fresco, in some old Mediterranean city, early summer, timeless, as on the fog swaddled Bernal hillside, midwinter San Francisco. Down and out on Dead Poets’s Place.
It had been a long time since the last time I was there. There were a lot of excuses. Always are. He never seemed to have one. It was a standing invitation. Even when he couldn’t stand so long himself anymore, or walk so well, whether or not the poets came to him, he went to them. Dapper or disheveled, the poet, like his poems, never ceased. Never will. The sheen of ink that covers the bay now spreads out over the sea, as we say: Neeli is dead; Long live Neeli!
Nicholas James Whittington is a poet, scholar, educator, editor, printer, and publisher, currently pursuing a PhD in the Creative/Critical concentration in the Literature department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he teaches Creative Writing and other subjects. He holds an MFA in Poetry from San Francisco State University, edits and publishes the annual AMERARCANA and the occasional small book under the Bird & Beckett imprint, as well the Slug.docs series at UCSC, and does letterpress printing and design work at Impart Ink, an errant studio.