The Joy Of Index

You know talk.  How many conversations

Get nowhere.  That's getting somewhere

Where I've been:  the stockiest restaurants,

The retro RPM stores, sheerest malt shops.

Especially talking with strangers

In old book stacks, rummaging and interleaving,

The glimpse of a Dickens page,

Dawkins and DeLillo, looking for code.

Making 'a mestizo'? She looked through me,

I go with semi-colons; break from a text

Then go on to the next, I say to myself.

She said, and ceded her Philip K. Dick.

We did coffee over it, under the filigree

Of pepper tree leaves, and finger sandwiches

Something like the English people do in film,

With watercress and butter and Dundee jam,

And when I learned her name was Aphrodite,

I could only laugh at the coincidence --

Almost leap after that surprise hiccup! --

Being myself so all-weatheringly like a god.

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