Clothes pins rest
like quarter notes, triplets, on a one line staff.
Rain burble, bird
squabble (at least when the cat’s outdoors).
Palm fronds hang
like sad wigs, tired of water’s weight.
Hard to know if the
pins play in major or minor key.
Bird squawks an
awkward percussion, behind finch chatter.
Do anything to avoid
the madness that is not mad enough
to leave realism
behind, its authority assumed, asserted
like an argument
without text, scream without fear.
“Dog whistles”
can’t be heard by non-dogs, but they enter
the bloodstream as
the kind of anxiety we feel before
we assign it value,
until that value slips into
waterfalls of
impulse without feeling, promising nothing
but metaphysical
excuses; it matters because it means .
But back to the
lanai, where notes and sounds divorce,
losses marked less
by anguish than by paperwork.
Ambient traffic
sounds on a wet morning underlay
the structures of
chance; our son called us just as
we spoke his name,
an event hardly rising to miracle
but not to be
dismissed as non-event. These disabled
miracles, or partial
wonders, remind us how lucky
we are to breathe. A
young man in Canada screams
every night, so no
one sleeps well, and we remember
how much we wanted
to scream our hurts out as if
they were plastics
in the belly of an albatross, freed
by a cough’s
violence to make an approximate
garage sale of the
lawn; we laid out our treasures:
cups, plastic bags,
little forks with and without
tines, creased fast
food bags already disgorged
of their processed
meals. If we find a clothes
pin, will it make a
pure sound inside the portable
alleys we walk down
in our suburbs, or the real ones
in Chinatown, where
trash is an honorific, beside
stalls of fruits,
the Buddhas that laugh behind
plate glass, stuffed
animals and lei shops. Look
at nothing as if you
know it and nothing will stare
back at you with an
absent gaze. To be Gaza’ed
is to avoid looking
straight at; in this world, we’re
all autistic,
overwhelmed by the sight of another
person’s eyes,
small child mourning his mother’s
cooking, image
precise enough to skewer your eye.