Fragile Gymnastics

There are hardly any cards left. The Liverpools of the world do not want them, and before their names can be spoken they are whisked off to the further rooms, the back hallways of everyone’s forgetting, done in time for all the celebrations made to honor singing for the sake of singing. Three times I’ve slept over, three times I’ve left the stove on but not running, three times past the last deterrent called by the Smithsonian this side of the river of stars. I cannot pedal backwards fast enough; the sand is beginning to thin, to disappear along stretched-out lines of walking back and forth, beyond every time a year ends and births another.

These fragile gymnastics are the play of rhyme and symmetry, stuck out and frozen like the lips of a private bat, one not made for parties or singing. All things say thank you; all things lie low, for now, while there never was a high. These are the garments used by news-media to dress up the bubonic plague before television could suck it away like squirrel-dust in the rafters. The spiders of the rainbow are coming, and they are battle-quick. They eat the faces out of cards and leave the numbers to dry up in the sun. The symbols are taken out and used to soften the minds of the next generation, those who wish to live abroad, perhaps on an island somewhere, where the sun hardly shines but for a few seconds of brief accent on the chalk-papery boards put up by mother’s schoolroom in the rind of antiquity.

They always come back; they always come back, yet the rooms are always empty; for the sake of singing, I always come back.