Jeff Weddle

Who Got It   Right? 

I just read a poem Richard Brautigan wrote  
in February 1958,  
which was about a year and a half before I was born.  
It was a poem about Hamlet and Ophelia getting married,  
which of course Brautigan totally made up,  
and which is also totally fine.  
In this poem, Hamlet  
carries a cormorant under his arm  
and Ophelia thinks that’s swell.  
I imagine the woman who would become  
my mother puttering around,  
with no cormorants in sight,  
in some apartment where she lived  
with the man who would become my dad  
and the baby who would become my sister, 
at the moment Brautigan put pen to paper.  
Maybe the man who would be my dad  
said, right then, to the woman who would be my mom,  
that he wanted a cup of coffee.  
That would have been just like him,  
let me tell you.  
What would she have thought if she could have known  
that her potential son would someday, while drinking  
his own cup of coffee,  
read this poem by an author  
she would someday enjoy  
and be inspired to write a poem  
about her and also about that writer,  
with my dad and sister in cameos? 
It would have blown her mind, most likely.  
Still, she would have probably  
made my future father his coffee,  
because she was always kind in that way. 
Now Brautigan is long dead,  
and the man who became my dad is gone  
and the woman who became my mom  
struggles mightily with dementia.  
Everyone knows what became  
of Hamlet and Ophelia,  
except maybe Brautigan didn’t,  
but that’s neither here nor there.  
My sister hasn’t been a baby for a long time  
and now lives in Florida with her girlfriend,  
and I seldom see her.  
What’s left here are me and the poem.  
The poem and I.  
Before too many years,  
I’ll be letting the poem down, 
when I die,
too.  
How lonely it must be to be a work of art  
as everyone lives, dies,  
mostly never knows you were here  
and then just scatters on the wind.