You took the words out of my mouth, Art.
“Hello, Art?”
I wake up into one of my eternities, my old mentor on the phone.
the road with its arbor,
the vegetable stand in the distance
Is this the hallucination of some traveler lost in the desert of time?
“Just the two potatoes?”
“I’ll also take a half dozen corn.”
I have my elbow in de Kooning’s face
I’m actually leaning on an art book.
Chelsea in heat,
Kentridge’s “Fugitive Words.”
The crosstown #23, a refrigerator on its side.
“Did I just miss the FedEx?”
She isn’t Chekhov’s “The Lady With the Dog” (1899) in Yalta, though she shares the frantic eyes of her poodle.
“Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot”
and
“Wozzeck” at the Metropolitan Opera
“Arthur. Art, are you there? Do I have a wrong number?”
“I got your number, Artie. You’re selling yourself a bill of goods.”
The telephone sits like a dispassionate Buddha.
“I want to end the relationship.”
Singapore sling
The West End, ’67
Andrea Doria ’56
“The War of the Worlds” halts traffic
The Hindenburg Lakehurst (1937)
“Oh my humanities!”
I’m barreling down Sayre’s Path on my 1999 Trek Lance Armstrong series with its US Postal decolletage talking about erasure didn’t he go out with Sheryl Crow?
“Artie, they say everyone is working at home, but I work out of that bench on Main Street by the Candy Kitchen.”
“Did your father study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, before he went into the fur business?”
“Yes!”
Francis Levy is a Wainscott resident. The Italian translation of his novel “Erotomania” will be released next month. His novel “The Wormhole Society” will be released in October, along with a graphic novel version illustrated by Joseph Silver.