A Poet Named Open Poem by David Shapiro

We make mistakes

For example, I'm reading
The NYC Poetry Calendar
for April on this
metropolitan spring afternoon

And I read that today Cookie Mueller
whom I slightly know from an
argument with another poet
and also a review she did of
my Melancholy show
and Bernadette and Phillip Good
plus Open will be reading
I don't know Open
I think it's not Oppen who's dead
and unfairly objectified
I guess it's a young graffiti
Poet, perhaps taking a single
name, in 19th Century excess
They're reading at the Anarchist Cellar
It's a perfect name for a young
perhaps slightly jejune ethical anarchist
Then I see on the 16th Open is reading
again, this time with my friend Joe
Ceravolo and my former student Joe
Lewis

Now I'm really intrigued
It seems like a blitz, an Open blitz
perhaps he's publishing his first
fundamentally daring volume
I think of my translation of
Baudelaire's Luxe, calme et volupté
Rich calm and open
Why haven't I thought of a decent
nom de plume like Open
Why settle down with four David
Shapiros
another living just a few blocks away
another painting in a style not mine
Perhaps this Open is the new
Rimbaud and uses my poems for
toilet paper, or perhaps we could
be friends, friends with Open

Again he appears at the Manhattan Public
Library
this time in lower case letters
and than again at Maxwell's for $3
But my brain adjusts itself to the light

It's simply an open reading that's implied
This poet does not exist, though he should
Open a young poet I should have invented
as when I thought all of conceptual art
would have been decent as one short story
by B

Oh, Open, you whom I would have read,
and you who would have read me!