Everything that moves is reflected in the window
of the Café Tutto il Mondo, but I pause to press
my face to the dark glass. Can it be that I discern

the stern features of il capitano himself, the swash-
buckling Mister Midnight? Today, things do not
look good. He sits at his table like an old genderless

squaw, his smoke-brown Polynesian profile
tattooed with wrinkles, freckled like a rotten pear,
but dried-out, chipped and worm-eaten, something

unearthed from a loamy tomb. Beside him are all
his belongings, carefully stowed in a grocery cart:
his bronze bust of Byron, his Royal Copenhagen

tea service, his first editions of Virginia Woolf,
his tattered but neatly-folded walking shorts,
his three umbrellas. Not even they can protect him

from a foul mood. Behind him in this tableau
the waitress–a slatternly kid with a bad blond
haircut and erratic lip-gloss–is sucking her pencil

or biting a hang-nail. Her order pad is poised.
But inside the Captain's totem-pole skull, I must
infer thoughts, perhaps recurrent flashes of a granite

slab, the final sanctuary of Samuel Beckett
in the Montparnasse cemetery. Or maybe he is
blessed by a frame-by-frame slow-mo clicking

through a precious memory of the last woman he
slept with or may ever sleep with. Yes, I believe
a softness, the tickle of breath against his neck,

the faint perfume of one who sleeps, or some
ineffable dream-murmur is animating his stiff scowl
into something that might even be read as bliss.

London Magazine, Vol 40, No 5, Aug/Sept 2000