Untitled Notes From Work

Having shed the carapace words,
is there time for a review of the hundred sides
you’ve given each event strung
pearl necklace between one-thirty and three
(showers and sun/sidewalk and lawn/
drink and book), or do we continue our dance
to the hip-hop saxophone riffs we’ve attached
to our education in current events?

Perhaps and perhaps not—not when you look like that—something frozen in the amber of recorded fact—no, not now, like that.

In the ballet of how much we’ve both lost, history will remain unwritten by a certain hand and survive—a wavering light in the shadows.

Will it not?

Two river meet and then…
which oxbows and meanders are
the rustle of events? Which thunderstorms breaking on
fragile branches in mountain alleys
speak up to become?

Oil and water running down the windowpane of events—
oil and water and time to be shaken together and separate again.


Jam a riff in piano, sax and drums—woman in shadows (and dressed in), summer room—her hand rising with cigarette smoke as if (when have we taken the time) to touch, to morph a minute into wine and angel notes full of the grace of chords, the fabric of dusk, the odour of flight (down stairwells, arrhythmic footsteps, a surprised cry), when gravity turns us into statues—jam a riff for the American street, the American comedy of money, the accordion man displaced (pennies on a bent and scratched bureau, a view of smokestacks stretching to), elbows jutting through doorways—the accordion man with European eyes, playing Tin Pan Alley and acid rock; (America, the beautiful) hearing lithe veils around campfires—the accordion man dancing to the rhythm Boeings tattooed into the soil of a thousand unresolved arguments for the safety and creativity of a uniform, silent layer of dust.