FOR a fun Friday night, in lieu of lighting a candle to St. Francis of Assisi, J. turned an iron upside down on a coathanger in the wastebasket to warm up a can of pork and beans. But the cupboards were bare of the requisite stars and stripes, so J. stepped out onto Night's Plutonian shore and walked (down the sidestreets? under the trees? with a headache? self-conscious? looking at the crescent moon?) to the grocery store. What a dark night, what clouds.
Edna St. Vincent Millay's translation of Baudelaire blared through the PA system as J. crossed the grocery's threshold. "What shall you say tonight, poor soul so full of care," she said, "what shall you say, my heart, heart hitherto so sad" (last week, it had been Rimbaud's "La plainte des épiciers").
Startled, J. bumped into Irwin Garden wandering in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans. "The doors close in an hour," Garden muttered, patting himself down and peeking over his shoulder.
As J. followed Garden's gaze (both of them watching for the store detective), he saw that-down every aisle, around every corner, against every display-the joint was jammed with poets.
In the produce section, García Lorca tapped on watermelons, testing their tones in search of a lost ripeness.
Behind him, F. T. Marinetti snatched a tin of Chef Boyardee's Beefaroni off the shelf. "The defenders of pasta are shackled by its ball and chain like convicted lifers," he shouted to the shoppers, "or carry its ruins in their stomachs like archaeologists!"
At the sound of Marinetti's screech, Velimir Khlebnikov, dyspeptic, dropped the box of Quisp he had been ogling, rushed over, and grabbed Marinetti by the lapels. Between clenched teeth, he said, "I, King of Time, invite you to become an honorary nonvoting member of the Martian Council."
Marinetti nodded. "We will glorify war," he said, "the world's only hygiene-militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman."
Vladimir Mayakovsky placed a hand on Khlebnikov's shoulder and said to him, "We considered you and still consider you one of our most poetic teachers and a most magnificent and honest knight in our poetical struggles." He turned to J. "In Paris, I accidentally met Marinetti. We didn't know what to talk about. The hatred for one another was obvious, I a Bolshevik, he a Fascist. Out of politeness we exchanged a few words in French. Ah! That politeness, Devil take it. I hate Europe and America for that politeness."
Lenin popped up behind the tomatoes, pointed at Mayakovsky, and said, "I like Pushkin better." He turned to J. "You'd better read Pushkin more often."
The lights overhead dimmed. Khlebnikov released Marinetti, Mayakovsky released Khlebnikov, and all three made for an end cap of canary yellow chocolate boxes fresh off a pallet from Philadelphia. J., gouged hollow over the past few months by a persistent pecking lassitude, drifted along in their wake. They joined a pack of poets-Emile Verhaeren, Paul Claudel, Aleksandr Blok, Guo Moruo, Ai Qing, Ezra Pound, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Chogyam Trungpa, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Reznikoff-milling before a spotlit milk crate that had been flipped upside down to form an ad hoc stage. The crowd parted as Garden approached, leading by the hand Walt Whitman. Garden raised his arm, twirled the lonely old courage-teacher gently to the edge of the end cap, and stepped onto the crate. From a deep jacket pocket, he extracted a Kodak Retina.
"Say 'Circe,'" Garden said as he snapped a photo of the gathering.
"Circe," J. said along with the rest, though through tight lips.
"What thoughts have we of you tonight, Walt Whitman?" Garden asked the crowd.
Whitman smiled, examining on the boxes the cross-stitched signature that seemed to resemble his own.
