Hebrish

At the confluence of tea roses and Russian sage

we made a right at the curved iron fence,

one of my dead friends beside me explaining how trees communicated

but I couldn’t understand a thing because it was all blurry — 

the way it gets — and though I knew him well

I couldn’t say for sure now whether it was Larry or

Phil or Galway or Charlie until I realized it was me

talking in some kind of Hebrish they spoke

in my town by the Delaware and it was used

for code the way one of the Amerindian languages

was used in World War II the Germans couldn’t in a

million years break since they weren’t as pragmatic

irrational and in-your-face as the English and Americans were.

I noticed the bees were digging in for a late lunch

of what for them was boiled beef and horseradish

or maybe it was just for me and they were bent over

guzzling madly while paying no attention to the two

of us or in any way tired of the nectars since it

ran the whole gamut from oysters to soup to — well — 

boiled beef to strawberry-rhubarb pie

and a little whisky after, some of it spilled on the

vanilla ice cream that underlaid the pie it had once overlaid,

all of this depending on the blossoms they circled over

and bent down upon, a cafeteria as good as the one

on Broadway called Stanley’s I circled and bent over

expending nickels dimes and quarters when the Dulles brothers

ran the country.

It was Larry, I’m sure now,

and what we talked about was cardboard

and we were amazed that in the open spaces

beside the hotel on 47th Street

there were four or five small cardboard “houses,”

both of us remembered,

the homeless had claimed to sleep in and provide

a safe place for their black plastic garbage bags,

the size of a room at the Sloane House on 34th Street

near the Pennsylvania Station where I put up

the price of a meal then for a clean pillowcase

with little or no stuffing and a cardboard

bed as stiff as metal and a cardboard

breakfast of cardboard bread and eggs and between us

we talked cardboard, shirts from the cleaners with sheets of

cardboard we drew on, cardboard soles in ruined shoes

we both wore when we were children, cardboard hats,

cardboard to lie on listening to outdoor concerts

and cardboard masks we made with scissors and crayon

for costume dances, balls is what we called them

as if we were art students in Paris about to

swim in the nearest fountain.

Though what I want to

say is the bees were too busy to do us any

harm and it was packs of wild dogs, not swarms

of bees, that terrified me (Larry, too) except for one

occasion when I pushed the wrong end of an old

broom into a hive of yellow jackets on the underside

of a low-lying garage roof and an angry swarm chased

me through the yard and over a fence hating

any form of criminal intrusion, urban renewal, or

gentrification, I who couldn’t resist intrusions,

who never could, omnivorous as I was, living on

apples and bananas as well as baby lamb chops,

who ran like hell that day (Larry, too)

for we in our separate ways didn’t want to be

paralyzed then eaten by larvae, none of us dead ones did.