There’s Always a Monk Inside of a Monkey
She’s talking to her father in Hungarian
and I don’t understand a single lick of it
but the one tree in the park is bare
and leafless and standing in the middle
of a cluster of lightly green blooming Spring.
It’s a late bloomer? I asked her.
Every year I always get worried, she told me.
That was a long running joke in my family
as I became a teenager in a family of Blumes:
The Blumes are always late Blumers.
I drank four kinds of alcohol last night–
beer, white wine, mezcal, and gin–
and woke twenty times to pee and finally
with a headache in the morning
while the rest of the world was busy and worrying
even though the scientists have just detected
the very likelihood of life on planet K2-18b
only one hundred twenty light years away.
Now she is in the kitchen chatting it up or down
depending on the topic and I tune her out
to write this like a monk in the eye of a hurricane
of noise, like a yogi in the cave on the mountain side
with a blizzard falling down outside, like a monkey
in the zoo, slowly peeling a banana,
completely ignoring the idiots
who have come from so far away
to see an animal eat.