-downtown is thousands of
floors above us where
the sentinels meet at the cistern and
jigsaw blue
it is so new to you
everything here
even after a year of trains and bells
i still find you looking up
watching the scheduled squares of city sky
the partitioned sun falling down towers into sound
and being tired on busses
where common people stood still
in the clamor and dogma of the country’s machinery
refusing to create poems
and celebrate themselves
i love that about you
the way you feel about things
how jazz fascinates your fingers
george benson
the africanesque of his guitar and voice
made you come to my room
asking was he from senegal
you wanting to kiss me in the dining hall
but had been informed not
to be too forward with americans
you fall so easily
i love to catch you and
laugh strong in present tenses
and when you told me you loved me
the diplomat in you speaking for the
shy african girl
it was more real than pain
i was naked
like children in first sight of the elephants
but saturday
you are leaving
going home to your people and country
that news comes as
an errant voice in the loitering cacophony
an angry griot calling my sins
come here loud and dark
a tense face from famine
everywhere
the shirley horn trio is in slow blue samba
a stirring snare drum forecasting winter
expanding symbol like sheer rain
i cannot escape it
men are sad
women overworked and pious
children shoeless in rain
yet this small bit of denial has sustained me
i eat it slowly and stay with you
each night i listen to you breathe
each breath a small cloud gathering in coming winter
winter will be a lonely hand in an empty pocket
a season of ornate absences
a conversation ending in silences and snow flurries
three days until saturday
my journal is full of blue poems
on one page
i drew my own eyes
they tell me to catalog each moment
to linger everywhere we are together
rush to you and keep you
on the next page a sonnet
but i have never been good at metered verse
everything is against us
even literature
each car horn bellows it out
each door click letting go a notch wound to my wrist
but there are always planes somewhere leaving
always someone in a new liturgy of blues
returning to the city alone
walking into winter where the birds change color
the connections change
it’s the new vacancy in apartment # 12
it’s in the lone pot screaming from the neighbor’s stove
it’s in the empty busses at 1 am transferring spirits
it’s in the windows like night
and in the whites of my eyes
