—Vita brevis, ars longa

Life is brief, said Hippocrates, and art is long, yet
Parra lived to one-hundred-&-four after he wrote

I take back everything I ever said at fifty-five. But I
differ with him and sought out his ghost.
Found him sitting cross-legged on nothing—electric

white hair crackling, unshaven, and in pajamas—
as he held an unlit Cuban cigar and tried to con me 
to talk about Newtonian physics and how miserably 

King Lear had aged. Impatient with his faint feints,
I interrupted his interruptions trying to explain 
that even my feeble early poems, some existing in 

perpetuity on the internet, when next to my newer
ones, show I may have improved over time. No whine 
from me about the old old ones written in blood. 

As I was explaining I'd told my kids it was all right 
to fail, Nicky—as he said he wished to be called—
interrupted again, shaking his cigar at me, said 

my words were all caca, and I was bat-shit crazy
if I didn't want to take them back. Then, instead of 
tossing out a quote from Lear bewailing fate, he chose

Stephen Hawking: Look up at the stars , he advised me, 
fading slowly from view,  not down at your feet.