
“the specific iteration of woodpecker pecking at yet/another juicy place, but I forgot to pack the guidebook”
A woodpecker pecks at a juicy place on or maybe in
the roof right now. With my left index finger wedged
where the guidebook’s woodpecker section starts,
I’d tiptoe out to the ramada or maybe have to pad
as far as the hillock of scrap wood for which Robert
has big plans to get a clear enough look to identify
the specific iteration of woodpecker pecking at yet
another juicy place, but I forgot to pack the guidebook
& in any case enjoy not having developed a lust for lists
of birds as I have for so many other often obscure
phenomena. Oh inner solipsist, Mexico really does
lie right over there, Columbus Circle an idea
of romance I never lived but visited many times
with people who may no longer scrabble upon
even a square foot of the planet’s surface, all of us
loving the aroma of roasted chestnuts & fresh magazines
& saying so while folding slices of sable on warm
halves of onion bagels. I’m almost sure Cynthia
once wrote Kiss me, blue dog./Better hug/than bite tough/
questions in the ass. It’s worth pondering why I recall
those lines & not the Roethke I sweated so hard
to have by heart in the purgatorial flat on Phillips
or, for that matter, even a phrase of Kropotkin
or a note of the trance-out riff I once pioneered
on Ted’s guitar as I gazed at the mother-of-pearl
Karl seated in the neck or right now any other
anything sublime as a peach after a fast.
John Repp is a poet, fiction writer, folk photographer, and digital collagist living in Erie, Pennsylvania. Seven Kitchens Press has just published his twelfth chapbook of poetry, Star Shine in the Pines.