96.7

Call it another rhetorical device to recreate the century’s slipping music,
but the crowd still won’t let me in, even though I undid the drummers with a
joke, easing the lingering tension in a light bulb filled with moth shells.
It’s moving in step with the city, something like a petting zoo & everything
becomes public eventually. Because there was an ad in the paper for a job
just like mine, I couldn’t help but bruise the downtime, rubbing the pelt
the wrong way. What purrs inside the city? Inside fields of corn & wheat,
tobacco & rum, trying to focus the rays since colors could add to it, edged
in by the airwaves, tumbling from the towers, the music that slips, that
follows us like fallout. The bleachers were crumbling beyond the buzzing
wires. Beyond is a thinning crowd. If I put my back to the radio it doesn’t
mean I’m not listening. It means I just want to belong.

If I told you to be criminal you need economy, that marketing is making us
believe we’re not now & never will be categorically mammalian enough to pass
from hatchling to fledgling without searching for a switch to match the lash
marks I’m sure we leave on each other, because the egg shells were ours &
it’s hard to build from a birth back into a stick figure expressionism what
won’t dry in a hundred layers of oil paint, no matter how fast or pretty, or
whose wallet the words are hanging on, ready to put a fist between someone’s
clapping hands, then this myth debunking’s done in secret, an inserted
scene, & the modulated tones in the minor scale tear the radio back into
bits.

After retuning rhapsody to its root sense, what can the airwaves stitch
together that won’t draw us away from the recognized world, a witty riff on
history & a DJ recycling pronouns, afraid to measure it against the real.
I’m running out of ways to make this relate, the everything electric
underneath a coming storm. The stories orbit, spiral inward & end always
without an annotated account, the third person in all of us asking the king
for an okay, the guillotine for an armada, the bend in a lily’s stem to mean
there’s solid ground somewhere & setting sail won’t bring the rain back from
an externalized, emotional atmosphere. Because the boats break apart in the
time it takes to consult the footnotes, I’d cut up the trumpet if it’d bring
the breathing music back, tweak the singularity of our cross-wired
conversation into something besides another burnt lily. Better to give the
ashes to someone who’s asking for it.

Doc Watson’s got nothing to do with the porcelain music. We put it back
together without so much as a hairline crack. Who says you can’t haggle out
a free lunch. The documents were dead on arrival & we milked the landslide
for another return to Troy. Sometimes it’s a tractor, sometimes just a dune
buggy. Everything coming back blistered & the promotional stickers won’t
peel off an ashtray monument in the MOMA. I’d rope the tire tracks outside
your place if it meant getting a list for these showroom departures going.
First comes the idea, the image, then the airwaves. Black bells. Bright
laundry. Boring radio grace. It’s true, the only place in Paris you can’t
see the Eiffel Tower is under it.

Is it an idle way to work through the mind if I count every telephone pole
between walking from where you left & the arching shadow the day’s become?
“I’m not blaming you for anything,” you said, staring at the space ten feet
behind me where the birds were pecking their inherited names across the
concrete & the weather’s abundance outlined everything savage about startled
kitchen light. This appendix blinding is elusive & those variant texts &
folios make the abdomen of it all terrifically wounded, sewn in static,
seeing a tree & for the first time realizing that it’s a birch, that I’ve
known it all along, that naming carries the longest list of conspirators,
keeps a room exactly how you left it, your glance to the horizon behind me
where I know there’s nothing to pull from a salted wound but the single pin
you could just as easily explode as undisplay me with.