Olives

"Dead people don't like olives," I told my partners in eighth grade dancing class, who never listened as we fox-trotted, one-two, one-two. The dead people I often consulted nodded their skulls in unison while I flung my black velvet cape over my shoulders and glowered from deep-set, burning eyes, walking the city streets, alone at fifteen, crazy for cheerleaders and poems. At Hamden High football games, girls in short pleated skirts pranced and kicked, and I longed for their memorable thighs. They were friendly—poets were mascots— but never listened when I told them that dead people didn't like olives. Instead the poet, wearing his cape, continued to prowl in solitude intoning inscrutable stanzas as halfbacks and tackles made out, Friday nights after football, on sofas in dark-walled rec rooms with magnanimous cheerleaders. But, decades later, when the dead have stopped blathering about olives, obese halfbacks wheeze upstairs to sleep beside cheerleaders waiting for hip replacements, while a lascivious, doddering poet, his burning eyes deep-set in wrinkles, cavorts with their daughters.