Now that I know she is lip-syncing

I can’t watch her,  I can only listen.

The ballet dancer with broken toes

keeps returning to my dreams and I

try to forget all the card tricks I know,

*

Play it again, Sam.  Lay it all out.

The invented genealogies and fake IDs,

your talking parrots and loaded dice.

We live to be fooled, to escape what

we know, to go with whatever works.

*

I could watch her walk all day.  She

wouldn’t have to sing or speak a word.

Here is the thing about spring—

its ubiquity, everything springing

in green agreement out of the past.

The Norwegian fir’s million fingers

all suddenly three inches longer.

Sometimes the trip to Newport is melancholic, no single reason why, if any.  Not exceptionally grey today.  No rain.  Not the anniversary of any death that I remember.  The waters of the Bay beneath the bridge were joyless.  The close-packed blocks of houses are just old, not charming.  No one is smiling. No couples holding hands.  End of March, I guess.  Only conifers are green—that dead, dark, ominous green. 

The driver had a Christian candy-rock radio station out of Boston on.  Don’t know if he was listening or not; media tinnitus. I wanted it to be in some other language, one I would never understand.  I wanted to be drivng through a different decade, one from a previous century.  We cruised through stop signs.  My hands are always cold now.  These days are like an eternal dusk.  I ask the driver about his home in Kenya.  His accent sooths me.

Back when your car was always breaking down, but you could fix it.
Back when getting her bra off was your job and sneakers were cheap.
Before spray paint and street graffiti, when you could always find
a pay phone and a dime and doctors made house calls carrying that
special bag they had filled with all their trade required & MD plates.

Back when the road was a promise, when digital meant only fingers,
when maybe the country or others had enemies, but you didn’t have to.
Yeah, there were shitty top-forty hits and people could be really dumb.
There were still funerals, draftees who never returned, dead junkies,
a winnowing out, mile markers like the white crosses at accident sites.

Got the Interstate now, Internet, GPS and ICE, old time science fiction.
I wouldn’t mind having a smoke with my drink at the bar, wouldn’t mind
being able to hitchhike south out of this century to somewhere warmer
but is there any place still wild? And all that’s back there was never yours.

What’s heard set down in clay /

words begetting new words on a page, no erasures  / 

more words, more words than sounds, no erasures  / 

type set in lead, word storms bound in books  / 

letters on a flatscreen backglow with no volunteers for permanence.