I Made Chicken Adobo for Lawrence Ferlinghetti

In the stacks of City Lights bookstore,

I wished hard to see him, Ferlinghetti.

At Golden Gate park,

I pretended every tall elder man was him.

Would he wear a scarf to flutter in the San Francisco wind?

It never happened. I grew up,

became a teen mother, pretending to be a poet.

In 2009 my friend, Margo… a bird, a real writer, a wise one,

took me to Shakespeare and Company, on the Left Bank.

She was well published in real University Press books.

Margo was first-name-friends with George Whitman, proprietor

of the legendary tumbleweed house of

moldy books and bright Paris memories.

Margo Bird whispered, we must not disturb George.

I could smell he was upstairs and now 96 years old,

and I really wanted to disturb him.

Sylvia, his daughter, came to us as we shopped for bargains on the sidewalk,

“Come up, he’s calling you.”

I held back, thinking it was only for Bird to fly up those stairs.

Sylvia swept me onward, with her eyebrows.

I had to gasp.

At the big round table, sat two old men,

Decrepit bowls of half-eaten food, and stacks of books.

I saw my own handmade poetry books tossed up there,

on the altar of Dharma Bums, like leaves fallen

so close to the knotted arthritic hands, of Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Was this real? Or had these ancients crawled

out of the rag and bone shop of my romantic heart?

Would Yeats resurrect and come strolling out of the bathroom,

tucking in his shirt?

Was George, making places for us to sit,

fixing to serve up Neruda too?

Honestly, I don’t know what was said.

When it was time to climb down the ladder,

cross the Seine, back to Margo’s dark red wine abode,

I had agreed to make lunch for Whitman and Ferlinghetti.

Because I am Filipina, and they desperately wished

to eat Chicken Adobo.

Oh, the fowl that died, garlic and ginger knots, uprooted for our feast.

There were no clean dishes.