The Wonderful Trinidadian Professor

"The Wonderful Trinidadian Professor of Metaphysics"

I sat in an eight by eight
ramshackle cottage with a sixty-something
Trinidadian man—clothed in faded jeans
and a turtleneck like a moth’s personal smorgasbord—
who looked me in my right eye and said,
“Did you know,
in Pakistan, there something is,
a miracle,
a wondrous natural occurrence
only saw once a lifetime.”
“On with it,” I responded,
waiting for whatever expectedly nonsensical
rubbish would spew forth like
Dracula appeared there not two days prior or
Three aliens played a rock concert just to prove they could or
The trees began to dance and sing songs of Fitzgerald and Chaucer,
but he said something quite on par, but decidedly different,
he said, “Believe when I say this, but there is a mermaid,
right there in the museum!”

I of course, in a manner of speaking,
didn’t believe a god damn word from the old man’s mouth,
never had, never will,
but the more I pondered and the more he spoke
the more I thought
who is to say, here and abound that there aren’t mermaids
sitting mummified in the Karachi museum
or even drifting with undertow some miles off shore
sharing stories of the leggéd men,
the ones who dwell off sea and sometimes,
just sometimes,
come out into the palaces of mermaids and Poseidon
to boast about their robots and fishing lines and
every once in a while will come without technology,
but only deep enough,
just deep enough
that they can still see that faint flicker
from the sun that sustains them so and they ceaselessly crave
and where they sing songs of summertime
while wastefully wrecking the etchings and specks
of civilizations long past that sunk to the bottom,
to the place where mermaids and mermen dream and eat
and sing their own songs of saddling massive seahorses
and whale stampedes, wars with the remaining tribes
of fish-tailed fellows who, just like mountain men
and people from the deserts and islands,
like to pillage and plow down others
because of poorly written accounts of ancient men
who gave their word to return at some distant, ambiguous
and erroneous time.

Who’s to say this isn’t the case?
Google, of course, provides the truth;
A quick search and you will find
that the Karachi Mermaid, while vaguely interesting,
is nothing but a grandiose hoax, but don’t tell
the professor because without thought
that old Trinidadian will tell you that all things paranormal—
ghosts, ghouls, goblins, unicorns, vampires, zombies, mermaids,
dragons, big foot, loch ness, Pegasus, or even that elusive,
rarely seen monster that lurks in the shadows
of daytime television, Dick Cheney—exist.

But at the end of the day, when the beers are gone
and the bar next door is closed down for the night,
even if it is the last he has, he’ll share a cigarette
and tell you, whether believable or not, the story
of standing on his roof in Trinidad during Georges,
nailing it back to the roof-beam—
rain smacking him about and the wind threatening
to pick him up and toss him across the sea
to Venezuela—and laughing his scattered laugh,
the one that sounds as if every morning,
instead of paste and brush and Listerine and floss,
he chews up cigarette butts and gargles decade old motor oil,
as his neighbor’s roof tore from the frame
and completed perfect Cirque du Soleil flips down the road.

Then he’ll ask, “Can I go?”
though he knows you’re not the bartender
and he has no tab to pay, yet he’ll say it once more
and then when you don’t expect it, he’ll be gone.
Because as he’s told you again and again and again
he knows all there is to know of knowing
and he can turn invisible.