If One of Us Should Fall

Reasons Why Not

64 reasOns why nOt 1. Leave-taking disorders myself at your doorstep yourself at my doorstep all night, us trading positions until your wife from a dream emerges and switches the outdoor lamps flooding on to tell us we’re drowning out the crickets; holding back the sun. In other words, Mercy. In other words, Fools. 2. All the pieces were not in the box. I spent the whole afternoon attempting assemblage and deciphering Korean diagrams. Let’s just get in the car, eat peaches by the open water and watch afternoon ducklings slant into bulrushes. Everything here is sunlight through my fingers, a badly translated version of something else. I cannot build a home for your blankets and spoons. Halfway there I will speak this into a car brimming saxophones and light. I will roll down the windows and let landscape peel the skin off those words. 3. I can cobble these lines anywhere, drink coffee all day, disregard instructions. I’m good at that. I search the secondhands for vinyl and needles worth scuffing the floorboards over. Soft-shoe, Foxtrot, Charleston: I could know those. And perhaps, if it came up—these rusty old springs beneath the antique sofa’s patterned belly—they might be percussive, and maybe. Give it a spin. Run those songs with whiskey. All the way to dawn. ...