Matt Donovan

I only noticed it afterward, hovering there above

my left ear, Burt’s I-was-there signature and message

captured in the background

                                              of my own there-I-was shot

I took while sitting in Tony Paco’s on Toledo’s East side

after pulling the U-Haul off I-80 on a whim and, lured

by the grease and the grease

                                                of nostalgia, ending up

back at this place I used to frequent as a kid. Random

all around. It could have been

                                                 any one of the hundreds

of Sharpie-scribbled buns that decorate those walls—

Hall & Oats, Nancy Reagan, Wayne Newton, Zeus

of the Harlem Globetrotters, Tony Randall, or Mr. T.

Elsewhere: Zappa, Zsa Zsa, Pat Benatar, Soupy Sales,

Danny Glover, and KISS, all vacuum-sealed inside

transparent tubes and mounted on wood.

                                                                    Or, to be

more exact, my selfie could have snared some other

celebrity-inscribed polyethylene faux-bun shape,

since it didn’t take the owner long to realize that

any signed actual-bread would collapse

                                                                 into dust

too soon. We got ourselves a problem, he said,

not long after Reynolds, in town for a production

of The Rainmaker, began the trend by revving up

in his Corvette’s gleam, strutting inside, and snatching

a bun from a plate. Or at least that’s the story

my grandfather liked to tell about this hotdog joint

he swore I once described as heaven.

                                                             There’s no chance

I used those words, although it’s true

                                                            I have little use

for any afterlife that wouldn’t offer fried pickles

and chili-smothered Hungarian sausages that seemed

to just keep coming as long as

                                                   my grandfather was

still alive. At the end of The Rainmaker, it’s not clear

how the huckster who rolled into town makes the rain

that’s been promised begin—

                                                something about faith

despite all evidence, or maybe some half-baked idea

about love? Instead, he just vanishes out the door without

explanation, hollering the last line as thunder booms:

So long, beautiful!

                               Sarah Vaughan, Stevie Nicks,

and Tiny Tim who, according to my grandfather,

ascended a table in Paco’s with his ukulele to croon

“Tiptoe Through the Tulips” in his weird falsetto as the whole

place roared. All that remains now

                                                        to commemorate that

high-pitched summons to stray knee-deep in flowers near

the garden of the willow tree are the fickle memories

of a few people long dead,

                                             and a fake bun that remains

in place on the wall,

                                 unlike so many others that have been

replaced or painted over using all the different shades

of bread whenever it’s decided someone needs to go.

I’m guessing no one bothered to shout So long, beautiful

as the name of Iron Butterfly’s lead singer disappeared

in order to make way for Tom Hanks. Whoever that guy was,

the slurred declaration of paradise

                                                        he once voiced by mistake

to his bandmates is now immortalized in their one song.

In-a-gadda-da-vida, he declared, having wanted to say

something about the Garden of Eden and it somehow seemed

as if the garbled line got it right.

                                                     Oh, won’t you come with me,

he sang in that drawn out chorus, and walk this land, which is

not unlike what I’m asking of you, given how

                                                                          all these names

make it so that there’s nowhere in America we couldn’t wander

from here. The Fifth Dimension, Hot Lips Houlihan, Mike Pence,

and, best of all, Peter Frampton, bun-du-jour of my youth

who for a few years watched over me

                                                              from my bedroom wall

as a mouth-opened, curly-haired angel in an unbuttoned shirt

as two stage lights behind him blared like the unblinking

eyes of god. Do you feel like I do,

                                                        he asked from my speakers

for the umpteenth time and kept asking all through the song

as if there was nothing more important to ask, so much so

that he chose to ask again

                                            with his lips wrapped around

a tube connected to his guitar and the words, barely

discernible, began to slip free

                                                  of meaning and become

mere badass sound. Do you feel, as I do, that God’s eyes

started blinking long ago? Have you ever felt like

a tourist in heaven who ate one sausage too many

yet still ordered a cherry strudel to go?

                                                                Which is to say

I once sat alone with my heartburn on my way to somewhere

many miles off while thinking about my grandfather

whose ashes remain in a cupboard in my parent’s home

since my mom can’t quite say goodbye. After a while,

to fill the silence,

                              I remember summoning up a video

of Tiny Tim on my phone which made me wonder

what was going on with that guy’s hands, given how they kept

fluttering up from the ukulele’s strings to touch his lips and face

as if needing to make sure he was still there.

                                                                         Most days,

I too am unsure what to do with my hands and so grapple

for anything within reach,

                                           even an old selfie that today

I happened to glimpse. I wish you could see it too, this photo

of me taken at an angle that makes it seems like everything

is on the verge of toppling from the frame as I sit there,

a gray-haired, gap-toothed, middle-aged guy who looks

incongruously blissed.

                                     Peer in closer, and you’d see that

I could really use a napkin, given the smear of chili across

the dimple above my lips

                                           which some people believe

marks the place where, just before we’re born, an angel

reaches out and, as if pressing into raw dough, touches

each face with a fingertip

                                          and thereby erases all knowledge

of heaven’s secrets, leaving us—So long, beautiful!—

with an endlessness of not-knowing to help guide us

through our capsizing world, no matter where we might go,

even Toledo, Ohio, a city that Burt Reynolds visited

many times, where more than once he held in his hand

a semblance of bread

                                      long enough to write his name

and a message of good news—This place is the best!

Love ya!—in letters that are a hodgepodge of cursive

loops and erratic all-caps veers,

                                                     as if he’d forgotten

how letters work. Maybe you’ve felt the same?

That you barely know how to give shape

                                                                   to your one

perishable name, let alone how to make sense—

because this is the task, isn’t it? or at least the invitation—

of this slurred paradise you had the crazy luck to stop by.