Silver Lake on the way
to work. Is the Actor Happy
on the way home.
A black charm knocks
the train off its rails
onto a parallel ride
through some serious winter air.
En route, I
lose all ability to distinguish
between those two masks.
Vic
Deceptively simple, deceptively
broken, some collision
of Southern Gothic
with Stevie Smith’s “not waving
but drowning”—I know so little.
All I can do is keep
listening to the music. That’s what’s left
to do.
Black and White Sky Over Loring Park
A winter’s civil twilight breaks
open a black bird swarm.
That caw commotion over church bells
reveals how little she knows.
Inside Emerald Village
Hands over hands—a grip.
Kiss the knuckles to grasp
the meaning of love
without words.
December 24 (Day 2,593)
Half page ads peddle faith
in 45-minute segments
by the hour on two campuses.
And a website to worship. A faltered blizzard
reminds her of her own faith—how
it works better
without a forecast, without
a Twitter account. Not
a without—a within.
Winter Solstice
A man in the corner
of the corner
bar sings “Moonshiner.”
A beat-up harmonica
gets swiped
across his mouth
between lines. She’s returning
from the dark side
again—bottled
water to her lips.
Leporello
She wails when he plays
it. If only those bellows were paper,
she might forgive
her father this disturbance.
Her mother says
he’s a little off
key—she should know. But
that’s not it. Her distress
is buried in the mechanics
of what we inherit.
No Empty
No time to mourn, to encounter
rubble in a hole
before retail monster walls
rise above. Dismantling
December air, live
instruments and raw
voices not welcome
in this symmetrical disaster.
Uptown bans all scars.
Day 2,580
Residue cadence over steel,
chilled, is a drink
she would sip
on cold nights to remind
him how she could look
when not trying
to be so permanent. The seep
continues beneath
frozen surfaces—silently.
Reify
Turn a soccer ball inside
out. Make a purse. Hang acetate
images of typewriters
from your ears. See the man
(the top of his head cropped
off) with a smoke
dangling
from his mouth in a print
on that wall in this café
where you can
no longer smoke. Make
a clutch with your lips. Try
not to cry out
those same old words. I’ve tried
this before—difficult but
not impossible to take shape
in warmed hands.
