The copier marked folders and guestbook pages
with streaks of gray and black and the repairman
claimed he cleaned the rollers, but the lines repeated
on everything. Finally, Luke agreed we needed
a new machine, but he took the scheduled
delivery day off. Why should he have to suffer?
When the man walks in with the new copier, I call out,
Are you my Technician? I’m sure he doesn’t know
the reference. I laugh because there’s no one
in this mortuary who knows poetry except
Charles the driver—who is more than a driver—
who would catch on if I smirked the next time
he came by my desk and I asked, “What were you
doing down by the watermelons?” *
When Charles found out I was a poet, he quoted
the first fourteen lines of Eliot’s Prufrock,
and amazingly to me—someone who has no memory—
he recited the last stanza with the waves and the mermaids
and the drowning. I put my hand to my chest—
which may have appeared melodramatic—
and sat in silence staring into his brown eyes.
Now the new copier is up and running.
The technician left hours ago. The funeral is over,
and the pews are empty, and Charles the driver
has left with the hearse for the cemetery, and now
I replay his serenade and wonder how we ended up here.
*from “A Supermarket in California” by Allen Ginsberg
Cat Dixon is the author of What Happens in Nebraska (Stephen F. Austin University Press 2022) and Dispatches from the Unfillable Sinkhole (Alien Buddha Press 2023), along with two other full-length collections and three chapbooks. Recent poems published in Gyroscope Review, Plainsongs Poetry Journal, and Villain Era Lit. She is a poetry editor with The Good Life Review. She works full-time at a funeral home and is an adjunct in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska, Omaha.
Image: “Empty Waiting Room” by Daniel Nester
