The Maynard
Spring 2016

0:00

 

 

After Jim Morrison, May 1985

At university six months later
my pal who handled luggage at Dorval
and spoke a druggy mumble of joual
both light and heavy as the heater
of a Gauloises cigarette left burning
in an ashtray or a coffee cup or
on the kitchen’s scarred Formica floor
explained the greatest poet was le King
des Lizards. Us guys hadn’t heard how he’d
admired Sinatra’s shark-toothed irony
but running nights the spring before—when she’d
refused to come to me, since I had left
her first—I’d sung, “Don’t you love her madly”
tear-blind, sneering, forced to laugh, bereft.