David Kirby, "Roman Polanski's Cookies"

One night I come back from the library late
and there are all these floodlights
on the Quai de Bourbon, where we live, and there is
this big table with all these cookies on it
and these big bottles of mineral water,

so I ask somebody what's going on, and he tells me
Roman Polanski is shooting a scene from a new movie
of his called *The Ninth Gate*, so I hang around
for a while and soon Roman Polanski shows up,
and he has this big cigar in his face,

and it sure doesn't look like a King Edward!
But then I notice that there are these
chocolate-covered graham crackers
on the cookie table that look like the ones
I used to love when I was a kid, and even though the cookies

are obviously for the actors, I couldn't help sneaking one,
and it turns out to be exactly the cookie
I'm thinking of, and since by this time the actors
have shown up and are rehearsing their scene
and showing no interest whatsoever in the cookies,

I take another and another, and soon I'm hog-facing
those cookies like nobody's business, only
just then I look up, and there's Roman Polanski
standing there with that big cigar in his hand
and staring at me with a look of pure hatred, as if to say,

"Stop eating all those goddamned chocolate-covered
graham crackers!" And while part of me
wants to say, Make your movie, dude, it's only a cookie,
another part of me realizes that maybe they're
his favorite cookies, too, and that even while

he was blocking out the scene and moving lights around
and giving the actors their cues, what he'd really
been obsessing on was those chocolate-covered graham
crackers, same as me,
though who's to say? Who, including ourselves,

knows what we know when we know it? A few years ago
Barbara and I were at this dinner party
and this scientist woman kept wanting to know how
I wrote poetry and how I knew if it was good
or not, and I said, "Well, experience helps a lot"

and she said if experience was all there was to it
then we could find a cure for cancer tomorrow
and I said I didn't say experience was all there was to it,
just that it helped a lot, and that as far as
knowing whether a poem was good or not, it was good

if an editor accepted it, so she wanted to know
how the editor knew if it was good or not
in an objective, i. e., quantifiable sense,
and I'm doing my best to stay polite,
but just then her scientist husband joins her,

and the two of them begin to raise their voices,
and even though I haven't said what about
all the dumb science that's done out there as well as
the fake science, not to mention
the evil science, suddenly they're mad at me,

or maybe they're really mad at poetry.
Maybe Roman Polanski hates me because
I'm taller than he is. But then everybody is taller
than Roman Polanski,
so maybe Roman Polanski hates everybody.

A friend who's just come back from Alba, in Italy,
say Beppe Scavini the candymaker
has gone back to the wife he told everyone was so ugly.
So now he has to say: "She's not ugly!
She's beautiful! I never said she was ugly!"

Then in 1991 I gave this reading in Princeton,
and the guy who was my host told me he'd bought
this particular species of a dog,
but after a couple of years the dog sickened
and died, which is when the vet told him

that the dog he'd thought was about four
when he bought him was actually closer
to ten years old and that the breeder had lied.
And then the same thing happened again!
Different breeder, different dog, but same species,

and once again he'd bought what he thought
was a young dog, only to see it turn gray
and blurry-eyed before its time. Then the guy telling
the story says, "Oh, well, as crimes go,
I suppose that's not so bad, is it," and I say, "What,"

and he says, "Lying about the ages of dogs," and I say,
"What do you mean," and he says, "You know,
compared to arson, say, or genocide...." But it's more
than a lie, I wanted to say, it's depriving a man
of the love of his dog, surely the purest love there is,

but then I see the guy had looked at his memory and looked
and looked at it until he found a handle
he could pick it up with, so who am I to murder his peace
of mind? There's so much we can't find
a handle for, so much like those little gardens with hedges

and gravel walks or courtyards with birds and fountains
that I've seen from one window or another both here
in Paris and in Italy, too, yet when
you leave your building and go into the street,
you look and look for them, and they're not there.

David Kirby