« No lie can live forever | Main | [tape blur] »

Tapering
December 4, 2005    File under: Tapeworm

Sunday, snow second-sunning everything to blinding, hard
to even look out the window, see the couple moving their bed
through the sub-freezing cold, the ghosts of their breath

dissipating, drying into air, the building super crunching
on the roof in his down-filled jacket, puffed up like the sparrows
I watched blur from bush to bush, sudden blooms in snowfall limbs

inspired with brief warmth but not to any new song: this
is what I want: a forgotten record slid from its envelope, static
and crack of paper a foretelling of the needle's popping over

the smooth initial quiet, dropping into music now strange
though known, something familiar edging out of novelty,
a chance meeting in an airport now fit into a narrative of

inevitable familiarity, the dozen times you were in the same
room unaware now a sort of prelude, now an order reaching
back into your accidental pasts to bring you here, as if

a pine warbler would blossom on the blue spruce outside my
single-panes, sudden and out of range, or perhaps a mockingbird,
something I've missed, to show me here to witness, an order

emerging from the noise, the nervous structure clear after
leaving, skeletons starved back into sight, the wormy kids
anatomy lessons in search of a theater: instead, a lot of the

accidentals are the usual accidentals (minor third in the major
key) and most of the same old music is the same old music,
holly jolly most wonderful time of the year here we go again

and the candles are out again and the wicks burn down to plan
the scented wax pooled, evaporated, apparently gone and
nothing beneath the flame but a small tin disc like a dime

spent for good: somewhere, though, all that's gone must
collect: something's growing, some tally like a sales receipt
emerging tentative at first, then suddenly improbably long

and frightening, the cadmium length in the tapeworm x-ray,
the arthroscope, the telemarketer's scripted pitch, the to-do
list, the recipe: the ash on the somnambulist's cigarette:

Posted by Jake Adam York at December 4, 2005 9:43 AM



COMMENTS

Good stuff. I especially like how the last line manages to be a clincher and open-ended at the same time.

Have you seen AGNI 62? I recommend it. A home, perhaps, for the poem in progress above?

Posted by: Dee at December 5, 2005 11:15 AM