revision

Period Ending

What I remember from the period

ending February sixteen nineteen

seventy-five would fit inside the o

near the end of Filippo’s with room to

spare for all the beer we drank on the sly

late nights on the kitchen crew with space left

over for seventeen dollars ninety-

eight cents, my net pay for the period

ending one cold gray winter day.   Seven

hours and thirty minutes at two sixty

five an hour comes out to one hundred and

sixty hours thirty minutes to spare

in a period ending aimless two

days after Valentines Day, a few weeks

into winter semester at Macomb

Community College where I studied

patterns in the acoustic ceiling tile

when I wasn’t reading Kurt Vonnegut

in the solitude of the library. 

Cat’s Cradle has gone brittle and yellow

as the pay stub that fluttered free last week

returned to announce one dollar sixteen

cents paid to FICA will be mine all mine

a few short years from now and once again

exhort me to Detach Retain, advice

I still find ambiguous sitting by

this window, dusk erasing my dog eared

Vonnegut in the period ending. 

Crazy Rhythm

“Destiny” 

Django Reinhardt played hot guitar sissoring

Two surviving fingers against the neck perhaps a

Roma homage to the uncanny arithmetic of fire accident

Of subtraction yielding extravagant sums of jazz.

But you’re no Django Reinhardt and I’m no Stéphane Grappelli

Gigging between wars with the Quintette du Hot Club de France

Who never passed through Roseville on a swing through the Rustbelt

But can we agree that “Crazy Rhythm” or “Tiger Rag”

Match the tempo of events the night I severed the tip

Of your finger in the bedroom door blood if not hot

Gypsy blood oozing through Kleenex lights blazing

In every room mom keening all the way to St. John’s 

Dad doing what he did best white knuckling the wheel

Church to Kelly counting backward from 10 Mile to twilight

By the time they turned east on Moross retracing his route to retrieve

Your squib from down low on the jamb lights left blazing

Open throated Chrysler carb inhaling gulps of east side night

Fingering the twist of Kleenex in the pocket of a Pendleton shirt

Wool plaid they last forever who would blame him for wool

Gathering waiting for the light at 8 Mile running toward the emergency

Entrance the way big men run belly out elbows in chin down

But by then you were sedated and asleep nursing an abbreviated

Finger perhaps wincing a little even now on certain chords destined

For guitar if you buy another door opens when one slams shut.  

inspired by Friday at the DIA

“Degas’s Shoulders”

draw the eye

to rolling landscape

bald

above

blue tree line or

interrupted by

crenellated hedgerow

daubed with a satin butterfly

poised

to dry her wings

before clearing a rise

of clavicle countryside

set alight

where I wander

lost amid familiar landmarks.