I love you I. B. Singer,
I love your lusty widows,
their frizzed hair
piled up on their heads
like bunches of nesting spiders,
I love you I. B. Singer,
fiddler of my heart,
I put five sugars in my tea
and you take me to
a turn of the century cafŽ in Prague,
under my red velvet dress
I am wearing a corset
that makes my breasts look like
perfect apples,
and when you send a suitor
to my table, an ersatz count,
with a mustache like a walrus,
who says he is a friend of KafkaÕs,
he tells me my smile
is as full of mystery as the new moon,
I love you I. B. Singer,
I love your Bessie Popkins
and your Bambergs,
your wild Broadway,
with the smells of softened
summer asphalt, gasoline,
rotten fruit, and the excrement of dogs.
I grasp my pocketbook tightly
and walk into your world.
I look through your kaleidoscope eyes,
old as the Jewish exile,
and see vanished all-night cafeterias
where obscure writers
with ragged cuffs
scribble out their times on napkins stained
with butter and honey made
by the magic bees of Lublin,
because of you I. B. Singer
I believe in luck and all superstitions,
I believe in demons and in
climbing up the highest tree
in the forest
so I can better see the night,
I listened when
you said the power of darkness
is like a monkey,
it mimics the light,
the dead, you told me,
donÕt know they are dead
and the living donÕt
know they are alive,
so laugh, dance, cry
and remember all philosophies
are meaningless,

I love you, I.B. Singer,
you made me desire
to make seven mile steps,
to take wine from the wall,
O, my vinyard word-wizard scribe
with your candles, cabbalists, cuckolds,
your crows in a pie,
your vision sharper than the moyhlÕs knife,
I love you, I.B. Singer, my spirit-pipe,
you are the kerchief of my life.