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.
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