Today's poem is by Kevin Prufer

Memory
       

The remarkable will live forever
                                                    and the rest of us will fuck around
endlessly on computers until we are dust,
                                                                  says my friend Tony
from the afterlife.

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Tony, who broke a guy's skull with a pool cue
then laughed about it,
                                    wiping blood off his sleeve,
because that asshole was so drunk
                                                        he never knew
who hit him—

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Tony, who could recite most of Keats
and lived in a garage
                                  and wrote furiously at a novel
no one would publish—

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You gotta stop fucking around,
                                                  he told me. You got
a talent, man.
                      The bathroom floors were sticky with beer,
and I looked at my face in the mirror,
                                                        looked into my eye,
my iris like a stopped fan.

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I loved Tony,
                        who told me I could preserve myself
in poetry,
                then drank himself into oblivion.
Because of him, I've been up late
typing for thirty years
                                  about my fears. For instance,

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my mother called to say
                                        she was in the hospital.
It's nothing, she said. I'll be out in a couple days
Are you writing
anything good?

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Lately, she's been forgetting
                                                where she laid her glasses,
her phone.
                Her mother, in the end, forgot everything
except how to play the piano.

The nurses sat her at the keyboard
and she played and played
for all the inmates in the recreation area—

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then, when it was time to stop,
she couldn't find her room.
                                          Anyway,
sometimes art finds a way to preserve
                                                              the peculiarities
of consciousness
against the sureness of our own demise

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but usually
                  it's the same bar of Chopin
over and over until the mind is dust.

That's what I'm most afraid of.
                                                  Now,

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in my memory,
Tony is laughing again
because he has finished another chapter,
he has finished
all the chapters,
and is having a few drinks to celebrate
the completion of his novel
                                              here in the squalid bar
that will forever
                          be his afterlife.

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Copyright © 2024 Kevin Prufer All rights reserved
from The Southern Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission