THREE POEMS

Good Seats

Ever wish you had a doppelganger? Me, too.
Sometimes life just comes whammering at you
every day, and it’d be so much easier if one of you
could shop, cook, clean, and take calls from
telemarketers while the other ate chocolates
and painted or wrote symphonies to rival Beethoven’s.
This is called bilocation, which is not for everybody.

Actually, it’s not for anybody, unless you’re Saint
Isidore the Laborer, who had a reputation
for ploughing his master’s field even as he was
seen praying at one of the tonier churches
in downtown Madrid. You could also try being
someone else, as did Alex Miller, an itinerant
musician until he was hired to play the King Biscuit

Power Hour show on radio station KFFA in Helena,
Arkansas, which is when the show’s sponsor began billing
Miller as Sonny Boy Williamson to capitalize
on the fame of the well-known Chicago musician
of the same name. The birth year of the fake Sonny Boy
is uncertain, since scholars believe he was born
in 1912, whereas he himself claimed the year

was 1899, meaning he was old enough to have usedthe name Sonny Boy Williamson before the realSonny Boy, who was born in 1914. Now the namechange is understandable—show biz is showand you do what you gotta do to get ahead. Once youstart changing your birth date, though, you’re in bigtrouble. Once you begin to think that way, anything