Kalisa

In a photograph I took of her

Kalisa stands in the late afternoon sun

Hunched over in the doorway

Of her beat up cottage

Overlooking Cannery Row.

I don’t have a photograph

Of the night thirty years ago

Hours after the jazz festival

had finished for that day,

Of Dizzy, and Percy, and a hundred others

Hanging out at Kalisa’s.

And there never was a photograph

Of Kalisa as a girl

Laying covered up by water

In a fountain on the streets of Dresden

As the bombs were dropped

And the city and its inhabitants burned.

Kalisa has photographs, though,

All over her walls:

Of Steinbeck and Doc Ricketts,

Of exotic belly dancers,

And a beautiful one of herself:

reposed in a chair, glancing away.

For some people’s lives are like that,

Some people like Kalisa.