The Jazz Accordion Player

buskers at the corner of King and Scott
Saturdays during market hours
(weather permitting).
He lives in the suburbs by a protected
wood-lot with spring trilliums and
jack-in-the-pulpits—a stream, a path.
He’s fallen in and out of love
as though life moves with the rhythm
of bellows and ends with the uncertainty
of enough air to play that one last note.
The jazz accordion player dreams
of being in a band, playing a Yamaha
keyboard and seeing Canada coast
to coast from the window of
a white van in need of an oil change.
At the corner of King and Scott,
he imagines playing the Frigid Pink
version of House of the Rising Sun
and having someone stop,
listen and say, Yes, I remember that moment.
The jazz accordion player plays
for vendors bringing in American fruit,
white sausages and chicken wings,
rye bread, dried flowers, frozen fish
and he worries about the bleak,
imploding November sky.