By the doorstep of The Museum,
the Duplicate is frustrated.
Like the offspring of a rock star or senator,
no matter what he does, it’s never enough.
He only wants to think dignified thoughts,
important thoughts, thoughts that will imprint
like an artist’s signature on the memory of mankind.
But it’s difficult, because when he thinks,
his head is filled with iron and bronze,
not neurons and God.

I too, feel like that.
You know how it works when you make a photocopy
of a photocopy? The original fights to be seen
but appears blurred in each new version.
Each morning, I sit at the kitchen table
the way my father must’ve years ago.
I’ve got my oatmeal and coffee,
my newspaper and blank stare.
                                                  The Replica

digs his right elbow into his left thigh,
his chin into his right fist, and then he thinks
as hard as his maker will allow. He tries to envision
patterns among celestial bodies, the mysteries
of Christ, X + Y, crossword puzzles, free will.
The expression on his face:
somewhere between agony and falling asleep.

Yet he holds this pose
as if no one will notice what frauds we are,
as if some world around him is about to make sense,
some answer has almost arrived. Almost.

              to the memory of Denis Johnson

The stranger bites into an orange

and places the rind between us

on the park bench.

It becomes a small raft of fire.

I came here to admire

the iron-lit indifference

of the geese on the pond.

The summers here

are a circuit in parallel

with everything I cannot say,

wrote the inventor

before he was hanged

from the bridge

this park is named after.

His entire life devoted

to capturing inextinguishable light

in a teardrop of enamel.

He was hanged for touching

the forehead of another man

in the wrong century.

The only thing invented

by the man I lost yesterday

was his last step into a final

set of parenthesis.

I came here to watch the geese

and think of him.

The stranger and I

share the orange rind

as an ashtray.

He lights my cigarette

and the shadows of our hands

touch on the ground.

His left leg is amputated

below the knee

and the bell tower rings

above the town.

I tell him my name

and he says nothing.

With the charred end of a stick

something shaped like a child

on the other side of the pond

draws a door on a concrete wall

and I wonder where the dead

wait in line to be born.