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*
But what should a morning mean
or winning seasons
in their pockets? Or that ball
in the seared ditch –
that ball in the hand — when hands
agreed to the expenses — to
the moods — as months were let
condition them — fitted
with summit promises? Faces the wind
retrieves — adverbial
and young — remember themselves
as shoulder-work / themselves
as customers — satisfied to look —
with less on their minds
than cheating traps and massacres. Faces
the wind retrieves — saved
by their grips on composite stocks
or foxed-wrapped wheels — drive
on a few hours sleep — hammering
the spiced joe back — until
their minds set up for them — and all
that the business meant — the ways
the catalogs described it — the flattened
sea-stones meant — pointing
away or toward some hard-done balancing —
adding to nothing / less –
if only this rearview headbeams gain
and climb behind — these same
foul strips and arresting laminates.
It’s thirty years ( let’s say )
cursing the cash-drawers / castanets —
the ( imitation ) meat — and
the high-volume autographs.
*
And after thirty years — in all
of the newly made
and newly dissolving images —
the visible
trembles its full length — stirring in him
this alien / apocalyptic
audience — raised on the news
as is — the views-letters
nobody thought to verify
/ the iconoclast cliches
and inclinations
whispering.
This holiday’s the most he’ll have of it —
and the heart at stake —
this singular and floating leaf —
seductive / fluttering —
leaving a man like this — a librettist
wintering — but not
what he’d had in mind
/ not what he’d
dreamed he’d
keep
of genuis and the price lists — of
the nights — clairvoyant
/ critical — the small potatoes
bobbing — in
their fevered pot of brine — leaving
the heart
at stake — and the names
let slip
/ in symbolic
maximums.
*
He thinks how the parlors zoomed. And thinks
How the buildings once — as
old and blizzard-scored as buildings were —
seemed homes to all of them –
the parlors where voices once were heard to run
with company — sub-dividing Time –
and adding to nothing / less — when words
adventured into cedars. The visible
trembles its full length — and the whole length
( mis-firing ) levels the stories on themselves –
and on the story-tellers — replicating holidays —
the holiday floats laid out
as the floats were on the blue waters — lost
as the moonlight steps — as
wrong as the cedars were / as adventures
seemed to be — and costly
as human rivalries / as solo guitars
on hills / in shell-tempered
pavilions — ferrying clouds where
druids winked — but
late — but way too late
for videos.
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