On Request

At the airport that carries his name a Poesiomat is playing him, or not, depending on a hand. Someone between a coffee and a gate can lean in, ask, and get a few of his sentences under the boards turning Lisbon, Frankfurt, delayed.

Nobody has to. That is the arrangement. The voice is there exactly as long as somebody standing still decides.

Ninety today, the papers say, which he is not; he stopped at seventy-five. On the Senate wall in Malá Strana they'll take the cloth off a plaque, and a tram painted for him was due out this morning at the Planetarium stop into the fog, nine degrees.

I'd keep the smaller thing. Somebody today will lean in to hear a playwright arguing with a state that is no longer there, then hear their row called, straighten, and leave him in the middle of a clause for the next one waiting to go.