Living Among The Philosophers

by Carolyn Gaines

So you tell me
you’ve caught God in a bottle
put Buddha on a page
Vishnu Elijah Mohammed
balanced patiently on the
tip of your tongue
in a corner
of the party.

Whiskey sloshes out of
your glass you giggle
and tell me of the
chaos theory and
countless Galilean inertias
on a barstool that
you suspect is
fiendishly Newtonian.

You crack an acorn
between your fingers
and with a lush sigh
tell me everything is
simply Whitman
(except of course
for the holidays which
are all too
Robert Frost).

You storm away from
the television set
screaming that Fellini
should sue
and if not Fellini then
certainly Picasso but only
in a Freudian sense.

Delighting in the
Baroque whimsicality
of the tune that
I hum to myself
you savor the soft complexity
of chord upon creamy cord

and I didn’t have the heart
to tell you
it was the theme
from Bullwinkle.