(i)
The girls on their bicycles stop at the cemetery
to mourn the passing of history.
How all those folk songs leave her howling in between
because of all those notes from Verse to Chorus.
Because Chorus is that reminder: something or other about life.
Verse becomes the Vernacular, as in she can’t
completely understand all these foreign languages.
It is a carnival of nights and a roller coaster of days.
The sound of grapes squishing in a wine press
and the lapping of liquid in the aftermath.
The poem about the young boy and girl having sex
in a wine barn. The grapes slippery between their toes.
Sweet on the lips. She wants this kind of touch. Her lips.
She keeps making all these mistakes. As in the Missed.
Missed Take. Miss. Take. Miss. Take. Miss Take.
Take. Miss. Selfishly. So?
So, last year’s verse contained a wind and a moment
to stop, catch your breath and sigh because the most beautiful
pair of eyes once walked into your house and stayed there for awhile.
You’re allowed to miss, singing folksinger sings. Now move along.
(ii)
It was in the closet, that blouse she was once trying to wear.
It was one of hers selves all along,
you could tell from the button holes.
Selves are easy this way, put on a new one each day.
Simply, there once was a self which never became.
So when he told her he loved her you could see the glint
of the curtain, as they parted and the reservoir laid flat
up there like the ceiling & the waterfall poured from it then like smell of pine, season fall & end, everglade in the living room.
Like the film she watched once. The hermaphrodite says,
it is clear I must find my other half, and simply,
someone never became her. Folksinger sings,
twist of fate, twist of fate, blame it on a twist of fate.
This is easy, rightly so, said the sailor to his shipmate friend in the middle of that great siege.
You can’t control when or how you die
& each day is a memory.
Like that insect in the St. Guadeloupe candle
she found once in an old tackle box on a rented porch.
It was not her place, but it was full of peace so she stayed.
The insect which died in the candle. She watched him with care
& said a prayer to the wind. It was quiet, the wax embalming
the corpse & the corpse illumined by the body of light. Candle
flicker forever like a heartbeat forever waxes & wanes.
Shadow of the corpse & in light of the skin underneath.
Wax like the ventricles of tree roots & mountains.
Roots that begin in the divot of conception
& extend to the rivers & fluids.
If you must die, die like an ember blowing softly out
into the wind. The last moment of the moth. How can we share?
Wings, we are carried through this world a thousand moving ways.
The girls in the cemetery are lighting candles for certain graves.
Fly like a moth to a flame.
(iii)
She wakes to the sound of Canadian Geese flying past her window.
It has been like that all winter. They swoop right above the telephone
wire next to the window and off, all in uniform, ready for the day.
There is often liquor bottles straying the street on a Sunday morning. Occasionally she hears crows gathering to harvest on the corner.
There is often a funeral procession on her road, blocking the alleyway
so that she can not leave for work on time. She does not believe in punctuality; or that there is a right time for anything.
On days like this she likes to watch the people gather, stretching out inside their car, each with their own type of hat, sometimes wiping sadness on their sleeves, but mostly, reading the paper, listening to talk radio with the windows open.
In the summers the church bells would mark her days
much like a magazine horoscope would.
It was to be a church bell kind of day & she liked the consistency.
It was small town, there was no moving puzzle or corn maze,
it was that kind of instinct, pseudo urban-evolution,
she began to know things justly so after a number of years.
When you have nothing to write, you can only write what you know.
Small town, small town, you can only write what you know.
(iv)
Town is a wind machine against an unmoving tower.
She is talking on & on about the sixth most bizarre kid she ever met, the mirror, and the thousandth cup of coffee this morning.
Not so much the bridges, for today she has not been walking.
Small town, small town, in which you need a song to be singing.
This is easy, said the folksinger, hair in a torrent of wind with every direction to give.
Town is a wind machine against a ghost town of industry.
The man in the corner calls himself Fred. He tells her stories
about the mill, how they would climb up the pipes
and eat lunch, the charred hands, the midnight-shift fires,
how they would become the color of violets, the man who died
falling off a steel rod. A kind of cutting. A raw deal.
She walks the sidewalks and admire how many cigarette smoker’s
can live together in one neighborhood.
She watches these kids dumpster for beer, stale bagels.
All the cigarettes line the curb without defeat.
They fall in lines like an army crusade crashing.
We don’t care if you don’t they say. All the small beautiful killings.
Far off in the distance from this town there is a field. The people who assailed their attackers and flew the plane into the ground were called heroes in the news. Sometimes at night even in the town you can hear her screaming, the little girl who fell from a great height.
Town becomes travesty, town becomes unknowing.
Town cuts mountains into highways, and years later
she still does not understand the level of rain
that makes someone pained. This form of exchange
is not so unlike selling fruit at a market stand.
You can only pick one, folksinger sings.
Consider how an apple is never the same shade of red.
Numerous hues to choose, but only one chance.
Once in Bulgaria, she only had one coin left.
She chose a wild bushel of grapes, grown
down the road by the old alcoholic man.
He pressed the grapes each year and kept the wine, every vat for himself. The small parcel of bushels left over he’d take to the market.
When she ate them she considered each one
separate and within their own moment.
To her surprise there was a different flavor for every one.
Moment becomes you. Moment becomes home
& home is always home no matter where you go.
(v)
Highway 28 extends across the river.
We’ve been standing here so long she says to the boy next to her.
The next day, she says stranger, I don’t know you, but I know you so well.
Today she has laid gold & green across her eyelids.
It shines with a density becoming. In the sunlight, a girl is smiling.
She has just been let out of jail for writing on a church with a crayon.
She tells the stranger how she met her best friend there,
an older woman named Diane.
This is the first breakfast she has had in months.
In winter, the ducks still swim by the river & she still mourns the sun. When she is nested, life is almost tolerable.
When she is in the wind machine,
the cold is chilly, but winter wilts her limbs.
The ducks are appeased. She gives them food.
She stares at their orange feet.
They are the most colorful thing around her.
She is lonely, they pester her about it.
They ask, where is your big friend with the long graceful neck?
They huddle about her ankles, romping about loneliness &
shaking their tail feathers in unison as if trying to make her laugh.
A famous film where the whole cast breaks into song and dance.
When she writes about them, she writes with fluorescent pink pen.
Town glorifies utensils for recording & cuts mountains for driving
& why are we always recreating things to keep us alive?
Call it evolution or call it crude.
The train floats past at a quarter till two.
(vi)
The boy is in a coma. She is playing a ukulele when they enter the hospital room. Life keeps living no matter the prognosis, or, what did the dream say to the dreamer on a cold November song?
She could see the thoughts lilting above his head in puffs of dreamer smoke. Melody co-exists within itself & as the folksinger once said, in our heads we’re all humming that same song.
When you have nothing to write you can only write what you know.
Small town, small town, you can only write what you know.
(vii)
Friend has sex with a stranger in an abandoned warehouse.
Friend seizures during a hallucinogenic experience.
She holds Friend like a baby for two hours on the sidewalk
while she screams & vomits on her lap, in her purse.
The people in passing were on the whole generally accepting,
occasionally tossing a sympathetic smile to her,
like she was being two things at once, mother & very fragile bird
trying not to sing about lovers or pain or young ones wailing in the streets.
Friend seizures on hallucinogens. Friend talks about the creatures he sees.
Friend dropping acid into his eyeballs. Friend dreaming. Friend threatens Friend with an ice pick because Friends betray Friends.
Friends she merely considers people because really, she’s just watching.
The people in passing were on the whole generally good hearted.
She doesn’t know them at all.
They have made her consider a certain type of suffering.
They have made her consider leaving. Staying.
Loving those who feel unloved.
They have made her consider the concept of six billion existing people
simultaneously feeling the exact same thing.
Friend falls from a fence, breaks his face, legs.
Friend quits smoking so many cigarettes,
Friend starts smoking so many cigarettes.
Friend sleeps with another Friend, & Friend sleeps with another Friend.
Friends take pictures of other Friends, Friends fucking Friends,
Friends forgetting how to touch.
She doesn’t know her Friends but she knows them so well.
Folksinger sings. I will watch you, always more distant stranger.
(viii)
This does not begin by crying. This does not begin with containment.
This town is a wind machine against an unmoving tower.
This town is a pressure brimming.
The Young Ones move not so graciously from one neighborhood to the next.
It is hard to write a poem this gritty with only small suffering.
You have not suffered quite well, small fellow, the folk singer said.
This is an old steel town.
Tell me about infrastructure, tell me about graceful falling, folk singer demands.
She has been nothing but centered, and selfishly.
(ix)
The girls in the cemetery begin posing like statues
upon the old marble monuments.
They are trying to stall a moment in time.
In death some people lay narrow & straight
& some burn up in a fiery place.
It is odd, the folk singer said, all these lives ending & beginning.
She wakes up & there is a note on her refrigerator
about the lonely old man who tried to laugh like a beautiful young woman.
She receive a postcard from her best friend
& the best friend is happy.
She lives next to the zoo & visits the giraffe each morning before work.
Days in which she receives mail are melancholy & ripe as fruit.
Postcards remind her of postmen which reminds her
of the postman with blue eyes whom she once loved.
He would carry her gingerly in his mail truck, tying her bicycle to his hitch
& taking her for ice cream in the middle of his route.
How she loved to love him from a distance & become.
She kept having these dreams where she thought
everything is happening only when I’m sleeping.
(x)
She just finished her fourth cup of coffee
& out there on the sidewalk these two girls come up to her
with a bundle of long peacock feathers from a grandmother’s attic.
I knew you’d want them, she says, & she’s a perfect stranger.
The folk singer murmurs something about opportunity & seizing a poem, here.
Hello, here right now, but she is not listening, she is too bewildered,
she is too busy stuffing peacock feathers
into an antique glass bottle on her nightstand,
thinking of this time a while ago when she had this lover
with a blanket of tiny goose feathers tumbling
throughout his bedroom like snow.
All this past tense effect, endings and beginnings, the folk singer sang.
When she steps outside to smoke a man is screaming
about how he needs to go back to Venice Beach
where the people understand him.
He asks her, if you could pick where you die, would you die in Amsterdam?
She tell him she don’t know. It’s all a roll of the dice he says &
he stretches his arms like he is rolling a bowling ball into a row of pins.
It is this small, you know, the world, he proclaims.
See that?! The hologram?! He points to a reflective yield sign.
It’s this small and you gotta pause, look around, and move straight through without getting all confused. All these people out here just walkin around like its nothing, HA. He is drinking a forty & laughs four inches from her face
before she walks back in through the door.
(xi)
This town is a wind machine against an unmoving tower.
In winter, the air grows cold. Sharp. Piercing. New sounds envelop her.
She always forget she had the capability to produce sound.
Today, she is a machine & her fingers are the fuel.
When she plays her guitar she feels like a machine
& her fingers sometimes fly off her palm & into the stars.
The sound makes a wind becoming. When she was a child
she used to dream of being inside the piano as the keys were plucking.
She wanted to become something tangible even then &
in effect become the product.
Affection, inside, touch this button & produce a sound.
Affection, outside, she wants them to touch her skin so she makes a sound.
As an adult you feel the affliction of this tension.
There just can’t be all this touching, folksinger sings.
Her arms sing from Verse to Chorus. All this love you feel.
Swing into me, folksinger sings,
let me hide within the organ of your sounds.
(xii)
Before he went into the hospital he cut her out
a sticker of a mother bird feeding her child a banjo.
She thinks of nourishment, all this raw sound.
The sound of a train horn constantly wakes her at four am.
Years ago when she slept at a lover’s apartment, the same train was so close it would rattle his whole apartment. The chandelier would shake above their heads.
Cactus on the sills would quiver, their needles scraping the pane like a 45 scratching. Rattling like her mind, like a snake tail, all this blood & venom &
she was biting into all this red fruit crisp because
being alive is supposed to be fruitful, no?
Ripened wind, ripened wind, the same train route at a quarter past two.
This town is a wind machine against an unmoving tower.
She lives next to that same river & she walks there every day,
to 43rd street & down past the photography studio where she once posed
nude with pearls. Nude with pearls is what she called it in her head
though every time the camera clicked it was wincing something about skin
& how uncomfortable she was sometimes in her non-movement.
She has become an eye. Sit perfectly still, do not smile.
Only watch what you see. What you don’t know you will learn by observing.
You are still so young, folksinger notes.
She is not sure what she’s learned. She thinks of nomads
first halting to sow the ground. Why all this ceasing?
Why all this agriculture. Mass Product.
Sing something about product here, sing something final.
But she doesn’t sing a word.
The first settlers were sad folks but didn’t know it yet,
now most people are selfish but can’t admit it.
What is it to understand a self?
You are still so young, folk singer repeats.
People on ox-cart pulled buggies once tried to get somewhere.
They stopped by the river for a few days & said, this is a kind river,
please lets settle here under a rock for awhile.
We are all living in retrospect of one another, please good friend,
kindly consider you limbs.
(xiii)
Once during a particularly selfish & hurtful time in her life
she went to that spot by the river & met an old woman & her dog.
The woman was kind enough & met her with a firm greeting;
there was no hello just a head nod.
She told her stories of all the things she had seen there;
the robotics institute testing aircraft until into the water it crashes;
then later, a Native American burial with chants & sage.
The men gathered the body’s ashes & flung them as far as they could
into the water. Cupping both hands together as if they were picking up
pieces of god, throwing them to the wind saying, we are here
in a chaotic dustbowl of breeze & love.
This kind of flying, folk singer sings.
The Younger Woman tells The Older Woman
about the floats & candles & the ducks that have kept her company.
In her head she thanks the woman for being the stranger she’ll remember
for the rest of her days. She has a fire burning under some rocks
& tells her she is burning her old things because nothing can last forever.
A necklace from a former lover. A book given to her by her grandfather
when she was a child. How we collect what we love always.
(xiiii)
Come here lover and stay awhile. She isn’t sure where to travel next.
Home is home and she takes it for granted sometimes.
She thinks I’ve been here so long and haven’t learned a damn thing.
You’re still young the folk singer sings.
Once she played her guitar with an 85 year old banjo player.
He said You are lucky young one to start so young.
He played a fine tune, having begun at the age of 80.
(xv)
She is making lists of the top ten most bizarre people she’s ever met.
She is making lists of how to change.
She is making lists of her old lovers.
She loved them all, and graciously. There were so many!
& she loved them all separately & in their own entity.
Some she loved only by watching. Others became her music.
One particularly made her delirious with thirst.
Gorgeous waterfalls upon her memory.
She is making lists on how to Reminisce.
(xvi)
In an interview, the folksinger once said, you will love forever until you die & begin to love again. What do we learn from all this love? She asks.
She tells us, a wise old man once said in the caverns of each day we will find hidden the golden sun. You are not so young. We are never wise enough.
(xvii)
This town is a wind machine against an unmoving tower.
She is collecting the wind & listing each leaf consecutively.
All her red candles keep burning over
& spilling onto her desk. Wax sleek & dark like blood.
The blues melting from a stereo speaker & we live in a world
where we can save all this music on a humming machine.
She blows the dust out of it with a can of air.
The musicians she loves most are all dead now & living in the ground; she’s living in a collection of antiquity.
She’s been keeping everything for so long, and just for effect.
She wakes always to train horns dancing, then again, seven am,
to the Canadian geese who migrated just far enough to spend
winter in the cemetery down the street from her house.
The girls in the cemetery are dancing among great piles of bird shit.
They take walks in the snow dodging these massive piles.
Shit takes on a black-blue glow in the moonlight.
See, even shit can look pretty sometimes the folksinger sings.
They are trying to put context to the idea of flying together now in a great V.
(xviii)
She thinks of all the countries she has tried to see, the ones she hasn’t & won’t but still want to understand. An artist practices active pause in the cobbled roads of Romania. She stops, thinks,
writes something about castles & moves along.
A friend she once had told her about India & glittering saris.
Children pissing in the streets, shitting behind sheds.
We are nothing but birds, folk singer sings.