FEVER
for Alice Notley

I have just made a movie with Sammy Davis Jr.,
and there are three crum­pled dollar bills
on an old wooden post for me. I pick them up
and see there is also a ten dollar bill.
I pick that up to buy a Cre­mo­lata Ital­ian ice
from an old man in an enor­mous straw hat.
He gives me the ice but says he can’t change the ten
and returns it. This ten, though, is a dif­fer­ent ten
of deep red rust colors around the edges and a pic­ture
of Mrs. Wal­lace Stevens in a lawn chair. Joe Car­i­oca,
the Walt Disney parrot (or like-​looking bird),
is actu­ally sud­denly there beside me, high up
on a very tall post. He is dressed in a full-​blown
Gay Caballero outfit includ­ing a col­or­ful cape
and black seven league pirate boots. Joe Car­i­oca
tells me that bills like the funny ten I just got
were issued during the war in Key West
and the Virgin Islands and that they are now
very rare and worth a for­tune. Fur­ther­more,
he tells me he knows where to exchange them.
Mrs. Wal­lace Stevens comes to life and hears this.
Another Key West/Virgin Islands bill shows up
(This time a hun­dred dol­lars), indi­cat­ing the pres­ence
of many more war-​issued bills. We’re in the money!
I say to Mrs. Wal­lace Stevens, “Do you hear
the beat­ing of the drums?” — mean­ing island native drums
and the approach of wild good times of trop­i­cal excess
and fleshy splen­dor. She says, “Yes! and a new dress1′
We set off at once to locate our guid­ing parrot
who has since dis­ap­peared. Even­tu­ally we did find him,
though, snagged upside-​down in a fish­net –
the very method Mrs. Wal­lace Stevens and myself
had decided to use to cap­ture that extra­or­di­nary bird.

– Steve Carey