Song for Slow Days, and: Song to Make a Lost Moment Last, and: Argument for & against the partially saved, and: Arguments for & against effacement

Song for Slow Days

On a slow day it is easy to tend words in bed. To create my own pastoral my phone plays its newest white noise app: three distinct background sounds: (1) a swaying, crackling campfire as if I am protecting a dozen goats from a dozen dark dangers. (2) a forest with dripping leaves, hissing slide & falling plop of gravity, snakes unwinding as if fruit for the picking. & (3) a piano playing the same two thick, lingering notes over & over.

It is easy to believe that these slow moments mean something. Snow globe moments when lovers fall like the flitter inside those domes, like the bone chips we pass as snow, & are slowed by water & antifreeze, insulation that refuses to leave us to our realities. One lover forever caught secretly piecing together a Christmas tree the other does not want.

Marcus Aurelius said many grains of incense fall on the same altar:one sooner, one later—it makes no difference. I know that we fall, that the order does not matter. On a slow day, it is easy to believe. Easy to believe that only nothing can return to nothing, so the soul must go somewhere after death.

Easy to forget desire is a hazardous thing to reveal. On a slow day, it is easy to forget we flee to find ourselves, to escape the familiar that erodes, only to fall into the same routines of erosion— breathing, sleeping, le dur désir de durer. It is easy to fall into the alternate lives we shepherd in. But some days, no poetry will serve. Eventually, slow, clotted nights break into snow or break into fire, & a goat wanders off into the mouths of coyotes.

Song to Make a Lost Moment Last

After surgery, my stepfather is a still life: a vase of marigolds, neck & chin painted antiseptic orange. He is disrobed of his handyman plumage: grit-sweat, ripped jeans & plumber crack.

Why a still life? A surgeon split his breastbone, rearranged lungs & blood vessels, plucked a plum from the ceiling of his heart. Then wired his chest back together & plumbed his skin with adhesive.

You ask, What is a plum worth? It cannot help his heart rise & fall. Why a still life of flowers? Because harvesting that plum was a small death. Because his hands are like lavender irises,

floppy things, big & bruised. But why flowers? Why not roadkill or clogged filters?Pit bulls, donkeys, rifles? Because I like flowers. Because for the moment

he is pain free, more plant than animal. Because the surgeon compared the tumor to a plum. Because the plum is red & swollen as if plucked then left to rot by swallows in an eighteenth-century still life.

The truth is I don’t know. Maybe the plum was really a lead plumb, something like a soul suspended above his heart measuring depth & value.

A French still life painter once said to paint only the truthyou must forget everything you have seen& even the way the subjects have been treated by others. But I think he often failed.

Argument for & against the partially saved

Sitting in a hospital waiting room, we watched firemen collapse a house on tv, an insecure home built on a cliff & a fault line. The firemen must have felt out of their skins, akin to arsonists as they scouted the best locations from within to ignite & drop the house, to keep it from falling into neighboring houses.

Fire is without malice, a tool, hollowing a house’s shell, but the hammering boots & hearts of men bring darkness, the caving in. The homeowner gave consent. But who can make that choice?

It is not unlike my brother’s; with a colon of cancer, he must allow doctors their controlled demolition. He understands controlled burns, how often we set minor fires to escape infernos. How for centuries backfires have suffocated undesired flames, restored forests & farms.

I’ve only seen homes firefighters have partially salvaged & never...