Among the dropped papers
In the long night of demons
In the short drive from moment to next
A girl, with her hand, in the salad bowl
Recalls the name of the man
In the vision she had
Before she stopped having visions
She shudders because
It’s clear to her now
That the man’s name
Is on both sides of one page in the pile
No picture
No mention of no children
Just his name twice, once in bold
She keeps her hair pins
And her earrings
And her feathers
And her beads
In the bowl
She doesn’t use it for salad
The named man was famous in his small city
For a song about kissing cousins
A charmed man and a charmless woman
Their doomed love, their devout air
Rumors tossed to sea overboard
Grown children skipping through forests
Where snow falls instead of leaves
The charmed man forgot their kisses
Deflected her love like a moonbeam off a Toyota
But the charmless woman never forgot anything
Except forgetting
So she jumped off the bridge
Near where the poet jumped and died
24 years earlier, a year before she was born
The charmed man, her third cousin
Read at her funeral
Like he was the smartest kid at a small town poetry reading
Rhyming “stop the bleeding”
With “5 a.m. feeding”
Then he turned her life into a song
About the deadly perils of doing wrong
It had a melody like a flock of geese
The woman with the salad bowl
Finds the page and files it away
She walks outside for air
And for the opposite of air
She presses shuffle
That song, like a beast of a love gone north for the spring
Plays first
She practically skips down Wilshire Boulevard as she hears:
“This river’s not like
That river, I like
Both rivers until
One takes my true love away”
She slows to a walk
Because practically skipping makes no sense
For a song like that
Notwithstanding facts like
In the long night of demons
In the short drive from moment to next
A girl, with her hand, in the salad bowl
Recalls the name of the man
In the vision she had
Before she stopped having visions
She shudders because
It’s clear to her now
That the man’s name
Is on both sides of one page in the pile
No picture
No mention of no children
Just his name twice, once in bold
She keeps her hair pins
And her earrings
And her feathers
And her beads
In the bowl
She doesn’t use it for salad
The named man was famous in his small city
For a song about kissing cousins
A charmed man and a charmless woman
Their doomed love, their devout air
Rumors tossed to sea overboard
Grown children skipping through forests
Where snow falls instead of leaves
The charmed man forgot their kisses
Deflected her love like a moonbeam off a Toyota
But the charmless woman never forgot anything
Except forgetting
So she jumped off the bridge
Near where the poet jumped and died
24 years earlier, a year before she was born
The charmed man, her third cousin
Read at her funeral
Like he was the smartest kid at a small town poetry reading
Rhyming “stop the bleeding”
With “5 a.m. feeding”
Then he turned her life into a song
About the deadly perils of doing wrong
It had a melody like a flock of geese
The woman with the salad bowl
Finds the page and files it away
She walks outside for air
And for the opposite of air
She presses shuffle
That song, like a beast of a love gone north for the spring
Plays first
She practically skips down Wilshire Boulevard as she hears:
“This river’s not like
That river, I like
Both rivers until
One takes my true love away”
She slows to a walk
Because practically skipping makes no sense
For a song like that
Notwithstanding facts like
“I like his voice”
“She had a choice”
“She had a choice”
In glorious noise there’s often the absence of nowhere
The opposite of light deflected
Off the dirtiest greenest dirt-green
Lake of the Isles gosling
Spring, 2006
*title courtesy of bluesman Skip James, as cited in Ghost WorldThe opposite of light deflected
Off the dirtiest greenest dirt-green
Lake of the Isles gosling
Spring, 2006
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