Tangent to constellations
now surfacing in the dusk
there’s a square of mottled light
from a gateshack
along the Bronx River,
a candle lit by a widow,
and the runaway girl,
missing all these summers,
searching with a lighter
for an unlocked door down a road
that leads away from the city.
Offseason at Mount Brighton, smooth jazz
Stylings of the Rod Piper Quartet. Chairs stalled
cruciform along the funicular on the hill
that mulls over seasons with silence
followed by contrapuntal clangs
and roars and clamors coming to life
in the dead season of snow makers and
swift downhill plummets.
The ride cymbal plashes through the measure
with a scrutable aptitude that leaves us
sad and listless; there’s a listlessness
to skiing when one has a love for it
as there is to this jazz; listless rigor and
unfounded belief in art’s transcendence;
balance, quad strength, I can’t explain
it but I believe it when it’s enacted
on a blistering high-gradient run.
A guy in chinos, an Izod windbreaker,
and a Titleist hat is saying “Montana
is the place to live for longevity.
There’s not much traffic there.”
Sheriffs and private security patrol
the hill, place of stacked bulldozed earth,
manufactured snow, indelible fertilizer
scent, the skull. The genre gorges on vapor
cooled to white morsels, packs it down.
Little figures hew to the ridge, and I wonder
what they’re listening to up there.
Scentless lotions on cellulite thighs—
inherited habit. Customed other mothers and
learned movie motions don’t smell,
like him, becoming sterile, sweaty,
and writhing; his fume’s religious.
Formaldehyde.
Pickled mementos stored on a hinge,
clutching a fistful of her when and why. He
could not bear to keep the list.
To clean:
The old frames,
imposing oak desks,
and then, cracks, nooks, and crannies.
There’s no unwilling
the impulse to neutralize.
Somewhere, between blank taste
and sudsy fingernails, he’s
shadowed, pursuing with the last light
a circular rubbing so fervent; bleaching
On On and On
