King Street
The noise
from the Greek
restaurant downstairs
subsides, leans
into the shoulder
for the walk home,
a little quiet,
a little drunk
mid-day, not enough
yet to cruise
unsuspecting
into unhappiness.
Cutlery crossed
on platters
for the final time
in a meal
clatters up
the alley’s brick walls
to my window.
Hear how the cleanup
begins, half
in silence,
necessary as feasting
but business-like,
all dry
transactions
and clarifications.
Once, not today,
the sound of a decanter
breaking
into shards breaking
into smaller shards
breaking
into slivers.
That shattering
and its shimmer
as the infinitesimal
expands into
the infinite.
Now, no more talk
of politics or god,
conversations
hardly different
when smashed to a din.
All agree
grace comes to some
but never those
who expect it
and never those
who try to
take it.
Which is how
it should be, if
we’re keeping score.
And we are
keeping score.
At night, the brick wall
outside the window
forgets nothing
of sunlight
from the afternoon,
or the rain,
the clouds,
the cold, suspended
for the morning
in the tangent
of possibility
beyond logic.
When maybe morning
might not come.
That syntax
of brick on brick,
that gravity
of mortar in
a magnolia shadow,
that accumulation
of history in
layers of sound
too small to hear
distinctly. Too loud.
Trace its ragged,
weather-worn edges
up the wall,
across the window
that looks on
the wall. Sometimes
the view’s
the window,
sometimes
it’s the wall.
Sometimes somewhere
between window
and wall.
If it’s the image
and not the word,
then memory
forgets us,
as I forgot to
mention the lamb
roasting on a spit
on the restaurant’s
back terrace,
rosemary charring
in a bitter
white smoke
that settles low
in the air
beneath the magnolia
and seems to
nimbus its blossoms,
fat when it drips
and hits the coals
sputtering,
hissing,
sizzling itself
gone. But
if it’s the word,
what’s to be done
that a question
mark can’t do
better, and why
even bother
with the lamb?
Oh I’m certain
I am wasting
my time but
how I wish I
could be as sure
I am not.