People have lost their passion for buttons,
Sid Lilly, the manager says.
The boardroom in a basement,
empty palettes stacked in the corner.
The last button factory in town.
I smell the mold of another week,
pretend to write in my yellow pad, looking
at the crystal eggs of Sid’s glasses.
He doesn’t know that when I disappear
in the afternoons and the staff assumes
I’m in the field negotiating prices
of antlers, hooves, and horns for our line
of exotic buttonry, I am, in fact,
in the south wing of the Zoo,
sipping black Chinese tea
in the rhesus monkey pavilion,
conversing with my little friend Troy.
He descends like sweet water through
the fur-polished branches, perches
himself in front of me and pins
the hypnotic gaze on my chest,
as if stunned that I emerged again
in the hot stink of his prison.
I initiate the talk, he gestures
that nothing has changed,
motions to my head, indicating
that I’m not that bright.
You told me that last week, I say,
and we laugh, Troy’s mouth open
in a pretty O crowned by the umlaut
of his nostrils. He flashes
the usual request for the five-dollar bill
that waits folded in my shirt pocket.
As I slip it to him through the bars,
his lenses scope the room for witnesses,
then the soft tiny fingers
absorb the banknote with aplomb.
Now the flat face, delicate and precise,
leans toward me. I can see the fuzz
around the ears, my silhouette in the moisture
of his eyes, the pink of his tongue.
I cup my hand, raise it to the fine whiskers,
and from his mouth into my palm, drops a leaf
shaped like a button.
grew up in the 1950s in what used to be Czechoslovakia. Shortly after graduating with a degree in photography, he left the country, and in 1981 arrived in New York. He worked in commercial art, and later as a translator and broadcaster. He currently lives in San Diego, California.