Thursday, January 31, 2008

586. Shhh - Michael Waters

The language that remains unspoken, often
for years, till the shuddering rhythm of the Accord

helps to shape a stanza you revise aloud
in splendid isolation, becomes another version of goodbye

still less eloquent than Miles' muted "Shhh" on FM
& arriving much too late to make leaving easier for either.

"If I love you," wrote Goethe, "what business is it of yours?"
So the spondees that propel your dented shell this evening

begin to dissipate in the never-imagined future-without-her
like gasoline fumes floating from your fingers,

while those smoky solos––how she clasped you within her!––
resonate like the muffled clamor of orgasm, chords

blown beyond improvisation, beyond prosody, till
you surrender destination, your stress-laden vocabulary,

to the tires' susurration on the sodden leaves, & the slow,
unbroken seeping-upward of the combo. Shhh.

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