On the Desert Island

I bring Brad Mehldau's Live in Tokyo,
David Shumate's two books of prose poems,
the yellow Rothko from the Menil in Houston,
a bottle of ink, fountain pen, and notebooks.

I write every day about a girl at Starbucks
sipping iced coffee through a straw,
looking out the window for a man
who, alone on a desert island, is dying of thirst.