When they laid his body down, you didn’t
wail or beat his wooden chest or
demand they shovel you under.

These years after he sings beneath
your window: you wake,
and your new lover wakes,
and you stare out to the wall
on which he once stood.

What is it? the new lover asks.
Oh, you reply, just the moon.
The moon casting a shadow
of ash flowing off the wall,
and the moon sending white
brick after white brick to
build it up again.

In the morning, he is gone;
your hair is brimming with wisdom;
the singer and the wall are ever
fainter and farther away.

It definitely stops.

You learn a new language and pass,
like a stone explosively emancipated
from the quarry.

You wake abruptly and walk
to the edge of the photograph,
into the white spaces
beyond.

You have the improbable habit
of disaster: how
you will run into a wall
only to fall upward into a wall of air,
only to drop gracelessly
into a wall of water,
only to stand still and watch
a wall topple onto the wall
you are building.

I imagine one day you will tell
your children of a life
full and beautiful and elderly
in your absence.

Trails and footprints overgrown;
the saplings thick as your wrist
remain.

A deciduous puzzle: how snapshot
flashbacks fit the deceitful,
slipshod narrative.

Here, lost, stumbling past grove
after grove, you are a botanist,
cataloguing, classifying,

denoting, achieving a
particular kind of
amnesia.

Apparently I’ve taken it upon myself to scrutinize the structure of my previous attempt. I present the longer, smoother, better-tasting, “Gardiner Version 2″. Still needs compression, mastering, etc. Oh, and some more structure. But I digress.

The Structural Integrity of the Gardiner Expressway Comes Under Scrutiny (v2)

In your grey book of dust
you have pressed and forgotten
a wayward flower–

rose-red in the hardwood grooves,
blooming at your wrist–

the geography, the history, the
charts, the graphs–

aster-pink in the porcelain cove,
no stemming this tide–

no unlearning
the facts,
now.

With each gift another
smooth stone dislodged.
A river runs over it;
the quivering babble brooks
no jutting spur.

With each gift another
seedling stems the flow.
You damn the future with
each one that transpires;
you soothe the fortunate,
present in your passing.

In a crooked room
I leaned into you
and we knew–

Soon the hiss and sputter
of kindling voices would
subside–

Soon only the coals
would remain,
whispering on
our tongues.

Just a short instrumental, perhaps suitable for that short film you’ve always wanted to make:

The Structural Integrity of the Gardiner Expressway Comes Under Scrutiny

Sea change: tidal
elsewhere. In dreams
you have not forgotten
Niagara.