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  • Pirated Music, and: Achievement
  • David Rivard (bio)

Pirated Music

2856 Kbps the download speed

—& tho there is no scot-free, & comparisons are odious, all you have to do it would seem is ask to hear the music, & you shall— [End Page 98] what life better than a festival of file-swap networks wherein amateur bootleggers cheat the talent of their livelihood, of breakfast & a mattress?

As for compensation for bespoke trumpet players & faux-black vocals draped in snakeskin, shuffle on, it says

if you’re on your way to the gym via Amy Winehouse, Miles in Europe “‘Round Midnight” 1959, & the one about a sailor’s ghost stealing back just to run off with the house carpenter’s wife, a pious mother of three,

—”are those the cliffs of Spain, my love?”—no, but

later, reading on the train, I’ll cross past a cloudburst of sailboats mostly Sunfish in the demanding wind & Apache Dancer’s fog of the river basin—the mothball gold dome of the statehouse up on the hill, red-lined Delmonico & Courvoisier specials for state reps from Fitchburg & West Roxbury in Bowdoin Street chophouses—

“happy when I am alone & not myself,”

I wish I had written that, can almost hear those words as mine & not Tom Clark’s. [End Page 99]

Achievement

As much as we wish we can help ourselves to coming home and to a pepper-heavy Bloody Mary and a back pillow and long flyways flown by dry-cleaned shirts & dresses pressed silk synthetics run-up by favela girls born-again in a factory cave strewn with secondhand sewing machines so that afterward maybe as we arrive again as always inside the smell of filtered sky & clouds crisscrossed by jet fuel while the dripping green light resonates off the edges of a red gum’s leaves perhaps we could even call it the family tree as we float there above it looking down through the branches at the test-prep kids applying their sisterly mascara in the Saab convertible committed as we are to achievement no doubt and having come home once more for a little while longer we will be able to go on helping ourselves then to the Frenched rack of lamb or an uninhibited pit bull encrypted laptop or pen knife— an accidental & systemic form of self-inventing life— and the container ships will go on mutating across sea lanes carrying cartons of bath towels hardwoods & pixels, and at some point each of us will know exactly how it was [End Page 100] that we came to be among people who are convinced absolutely that they know the score.

David Rivard

David Rivard is the author, most recently, of Sugartown (Graywolf P). His poems and essays appear widely, and he teaches in the mfa program in writing at the University of New Hampshire.

“How has being a boomer affected me as a writer?—it makes me feel like this haiku by Issa: Every year on the monkey’s face / at New Year’s / a monkey face.”

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