Album Rating: 2.0
The first, the middle, and the last thing she told me was not to think,
but to feel, and then she hung up.
What’s your poem about? she’d asked.
Oh, you know, I’d said, the fall of the LifeWay building.
Why?
Why? I don’t know. It’s weird.
I had worked there for a year,
I had an office with a window,
I had an uncrack-able password,
I was twenty-three and proud.
Then California developers bought it out,
sent thirty-year employees into cubicle farms,
and everyone seemed either so bored
or so in transit
or remote
that I started taking two-hour lunches,
walking across 12th Street
to the art museum cafeteria
attending docent-guided rambles
through the House of Alba,
Goya’s White Duchess and her little dog,
faded tapestries pricier than warships;
then I saw the tower’s implosion
on fucking Facebook, 800 miles away
and I thought
maybe there’s a poem in that?
All that glass. All that time. Boom.
No, she said,
That’s a terrible idea.
So it fell.
But how do you feel about that?
I thought, then,
about the poem’s purpose.
I had wanted to synthesize the realities of business
with those of breakups in slow motion, imploding,
but there are only so many pearls in a sea of that shit,
when people say they’ll be in touch, secreting full well the pleasure
of a theremin bureaucracy, when you’re a mutt between masters.
So when the deal closes just like that,
when infinites collide, when multiverses converge,
well, it’s Babel falling merely...
new management, new watchwords,
a series of sunsets, cityscape sunsets, finite,
phthalocyanine blue, heliotrope, the horizon dune-yellowing,
lumbering all, Nashville bulging at the seams...
Where’s the juice? she’d said.
What’s going to grab me?
Honestly, I don’t feel much, I’d said.
It’s gone, I guess.
Weren’t you crying earlier?
That’s what you should write about,
not some dumb building.
Write about what upsets you.
Can you think of anything?
Yes, I’d said.
Being here, and confused,
and you
|
Album Rating: 2.0
A silence I’ve learned to cherish and then,
I don’t believe you’ll take my advice.
I said I would, and she urged me, again, to feel...
Pretend I have a knife
Clutched to your neck
until you’re finished.
Now, listen to me –– relax,
don’t think,
and if you’re thinking,
‘hey, here’s a thought,’
then give it up.
|
