We sing our ruby sunset song
for Jennifer who
didn’t return.

It’s a day icicles advance
the periglacial landscape of
stalactite memories.

A crow tests trees limb by
limb and streetcars
appear to be derailed.

Collision course collision course —
words are a twisted wreckage
under brightening street lights.

In the corners of my prior actions
you sweep with single-minded
purpose until all light is gone.

How Time Affects Our Vision

slippery slope, clouds torn by trees,
double vision over coffee
at a table investing in testosterone
and woven with the smiles of infants,
skipping suggestions trolling
the space between bus stops
and hoop skirts sailing errant breezes,
the double entendre of situation
and possibility, available volume
and fulfillment — the way arrival
is a lone point at perihelion —
a place of perception
where denument never occurs.

Bourbon Street

A banjo player has been sitting
on his chrome-sculpted chair,
sequestered between two derelict
vehicles. For three days now,
his picking has tracked his guttural voice
through songs born south of New Orleans.

Yesterday, I imagined Flatt and Scruggs,
the money of oil, the ascendency
of an incontinent middle America,
roses caressing our lost kitchen window,
abandoned at Washington’s black wall;
all signed by battered banjo fingers.

At noon today, I texted you —
a smart move, a predictable move
concerning Elisha and hockey, this weekend,
the time I have with her, the dreams
I’ve woven into her evolving
personality, her penchant for character.

I often conceive in terms of photographs
and frames; how events and space
converge into a fabrication we embrace,
become polemics for. There isn’t
a point of communion between a banjo player
and Elisha, a streetscape and her life

yet I feel compelled to imagine every outcome;
every deviation from the preferential path.