Soundtrack

Soundtrack

3:36
Harvey, your car stereo left rhythm's tinnitus patting
my head, a diaphanous afro, as I gathered
steam in the glancing shafts of sad and angry light
playing about the purblind alley the idling
cruiser's fingers drumming alike
each wall, uniform and alleged offender.
An empty lot jagged with the fallout of forties
targeted along the brick glimpsed the familiar
rodeo of arrest. A plastic bag threshed snagged
on a twigged umbrella. I was momentarily
immersed in those resinous moments in a way
I still recall sharp as the pine trees from
the carwash, as if I could set a needle on the ridge
between them—not the pine trees, Harvey, but that vinyl
fermata between memories, lower my eyelids
like a dust cover and let it play. This is where
I begin again in this wasted province before
rowhouses whose dooryards are the street. A block
whited like covered wagons out the verge. A block
away, your stereo continues to train coins of car-
flung beats astride my heels' hollow drops along the shoveled
walk. Still I'm searching for excuses to celebrate you.
Still searching for the source of the impulse to celebrate.
Yet I loved not you but your attentions thus I sing
myself. And how know the man but for his rhythms?
Your music would make me authentic. So goes the rhythm
so goes the nation. Miss Jackson notwithstanding.

2:48
Your music would make me authentic. Each bass beat
shadowed by trill richter I can still hear the car
body chattering as if it were hitting the rumble strips
approaching a toll. Still its absent pulse jacks the fish
seat of the brain where the body is taken in tow
like a Viking burial: police lights lob small
comets at my feet the ground littered with ziplock
dimebags and the origami boxes of General Tso.
I sigh submission to the tide my shoes sniffling
pebbled ice and snow. I can't help
but keep step with the music. I'm hard
wired for the groove and am the groove the beat absent
mindedly. Harvey, I am the only address
I can reach you: both call and response you
slow the surface of my voice until it casts only
reflections. Like my image in the tinted window
of a parked car reducing to yet another prior self,
the pre-teen of me nested like a Russian doll inside
this memory, holding the shoulder-strapped
recorder with creaking spools I once when
innocent sang I Wanna Get Next To You into as if
packing a little suitcase, working the catches—the words
like shoes too big to fill I pushed them around
the cassette barely knowing what they want, singing
them like someone's name I didn't know

4:43
I'd gotten wrong. What escapes, the present
it loses sequence as I slip the cuffs the stir-crazed
drama of moments filled with contingency.
Music in the bones they say. In fairness
it is not that the goldfish experiences memory
loss, born to each moment anew, but that
the goldfish is aware of time no more than it is
aware of water. I know these things. I once wore black
canvass shoes with transparent soles the color
of goldfish when I hit house parties with you in 8^th
grade. It hurts me to recall. But there it is: Shame
leaning against the closet door each morning whistling
tunes of limitation and regret. Still I live for days
when the metaphorical knotted string on my finger goes absent
as the glasses lost on my grandfather's forehead and the
earth bears me in a personal surf where the ground
moves like an airport walkway and there could be a camera
on a dolly leading me as sounds of the town meeting
melodies in my head drown out the voice-over maundering
evening's self-conscious intentions. I'd play the street life
like a ouija board, the dynamic landscape shuttling
the fragmented aural text...