By Marc Vincenz
I had intended to write
this poem about Parsifal,
the same in Wagner’s opera.
I considered it would put
a little romance back into things—
knights, steeds, maidens, kings;
and then I was reading Charles Simic
over dinner, I’d cooked myself, for myself,
and I realized that if he’d written a poem
about Parsifal, he too would not have
written about the legend itself,
he would have likened the Wagnerian opera
to something akin to life on the docks in New York,
red dresses stolen from the backs of trucks,
making love behind a refrigerator
in his seedy apartment
with a bowl of spaghetti tossing
through his and his lover’s hair.
first published in Prick of the Spindle
