Memory is Blood Soluble

I am still the old man with the street organ and cat, turning the same crank and expecting moonlight. What I remember: smoke of houses on the riverbank. Storm on mute. Temple broken, lamb-entered. You loved my bones because they were white. In the gathering blindness, you bandaged my body, and in doing so made it my body. I can’t remember which chord heals visions or causes them. Which summons a cloud of b­­­ees from the stone, or conceals your shape behind a flame. It is every guitar I have found in the gutter. Every name on the edge of being gone.

Related Poems

Mixed with always:

Your songs
        	are the impossible ruins
        	that keep the hours on turn.
        	Keep awe bare like
sound at night.
The candle burn. Ice
melts and wax. The dirt
on your mind. Engines roll
in clutter. Clank cool
and electrify the room.
We always
become mysterious—
birds at the end of each evening.
Whoever does the telling stops
time like a crescendo. We hit
blue notes so the edges
of your honey jars rattle laughter
against our teeth.
Rhythm breaks
like need or the knowledge
a mouth organ has
about breath and tone, blood
and gravity and balance—
all those sweet sounds
that can make even
windows shatter.

Derrida/Coleman

Were it possible, I would be naked. Of the nude philosophy:
consider the globalization of the expensive american sound. 

Should we worry? We should work. I believe you’re right.
I distrust the word “white.” It’s sanctified propaganda. 

Repetition is my language of origin, the highest technology. Anyway
the body is only mine provisionally. For reasons that I’m not sure of,
I am convinced that before becoming music, music was only a word. 

I prefer to destroy the composer, renew the concept.
Extraordinary limitation playing freedom.

Song Book

Tiny keyboard bearing the massive reverie of the past—
press one button, we’re carried away on a country road,
marching with saints, leaving the Red River Valley...
here is every holiday you hated, every hard time,
each steamy summer wish. You closed your eyes
in the wooden stairwell, leaning your head against the wall,
knowing a bigger world loomed. It’s still out there,
and it’s tucked in this keyboard too,
now we are an organ, now we are an oboe,
now we are young or ancient,
now we are smelling wallpaper in the house
our grandfather sold with every cabinet,
table and doily included,
but we are still adrift, floating,
thrum-full of longing layers of sound.