stuart dybek
"Autobio-graphy" (6)
When it rained on Eighteenth Street
I believed that rain was falling
all over the world. I believed
the neighborhood's war dead were buried
beneath the plaque of their names
on the corner Victory garden,
and I worried that if people kept dying
the earth would be used up for cemeteries.
I worried that if we kept using
the same notes over
we'd run out of songs.
Chord
A man steps out of sunlight
sunlight that streams like grace,
still gaping at blue sky
staked across the emptiness of space,
into a history where shadows
assume a human face.
A man slips into silence
that began as a cry,
still trailing music
although reduced to the sigh
of an accordion
as it folds into its case.
"Autobio-graphy" (8)
I've left out nothing;
these images are what I learned.
It's not that I didn't listen,
but it wasn't my language
in matters of sex or money.
What might have been told
was abandoned like excess baggage,
and the commonplace has assumed
the mysterious presence
of the lost.
Excerpt from "Seven Sentences"
There's a perspective to a sentence and within its order a trail of discarded clothes leading beyond the frame.
Excerpts from "Ginny's Basement"
Down crumbling steps
mortared with moss,
we'd descended
from summer's feverish perfume
to the cool damp reek of drains,
from the tweet of flirting songbirds
and torqued thrum of bees
to the nasal echoes
of underground mains
toward which startled water bugs
scurried.
beneath its canopy
of clothesline and live wires
snubbed in electric tape.
A necklace of cold sweat
beaded from tarnished pipes.
At a workbench, a vise
clenched a sawed strip of molding.
I tried to erase
the prints my sneakers
tracked through sawdust.
beneath its canopy