Screen Dump 715

Losing your place in line at a tag team lawn party

the moment-to-moment gazes

the moment-to-moment costumes . . .

The iffyness . . . especially the embellishments

highlighting the timetable of your life . . .

where you are . . . and why . . .

The accumulation of happenstance . . . scripted . . .

does little to quell the offhandedness . . .

The offhanded notations of old money . . . of old and new money . . .

Consulting a flowchart for next steps . . .

But is it enough? . . .

Antonio Palmerini

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Irrevocability pins you to the mat

to wrangle seconds . . . or thirds . . .

as if messaging with footnotes a sarabande by Yo-Yo Ma . . .

Why bother sweating the opening bars

with the prelude bleeding through the score

inflicted by a little-known? . . .

You're regressing faster than the speed of sound

to when you auditioned for intimacy's promises

and were thrown for an infinite loop

by odysseyites reopening the book to the chapter you slammed shut . . .

A well-known misstep, yes? . . .

Antonio Palmerini

 The Poetry Hotel at the Rensselaerville Library . . .

Woman XLVII

(reposted from Tuesday, April 19, 2016)

She consorts with puppets . . . no strings attached . . .

in a room filled with bobby-soxers

where she is subjected to the free passes

of agents who feign muteness

to fake Stradivari's signature

while playing stoop-ball with bassoonists smoking joints.

Weed is dressed to kill.

She loves basement bashes . . . un-posing . . .

and underclothing worn out.

The streets criticize her player-piano introductions

bottlenecked on bridges during rush hour.

Her wherewithal has caught on

with post-coital interviewers

who tweet at double-headers

where triple plays are as commonplace

as nosebleeds.

Costumed for night . . . she seldom rides shotgun

saving her literary lollipops for footnotes

and phony phone numbers floating in her wake . . .

her long legs spanning one and a half sidewalk cracks.

Let's Get Lost

Chet Baker 12/23/1929 - 5/13/1988

Leaving the airport at 5:30 AM you keep replaying the opening bars to All Blues from The Last Great Concert recorded two weeks before he fell out of a window in Amsterdam . . .

because you can't stop
because you can't get over how perfectly he nailed it
because it's one of the closest things you've encountered
and for a few moments . . . nothing else matters . . .

Screen Dump 713

Nonsense lapses into feigned forgetfulness

dumping you in the middle of nowhere . . .

second guesses segue to pastoral settings

upstate with stemmed glass bumped

to the edge of tomorrow as Georgian models

infiltrate your REM sleep . . .

There's a history, of course, going back to the City

where who knows what happened . . .

the loss temporary . . . weighing the pluses and minuses

of your next move . . . memories of tagalongs

bloating the escape route . . . conflating the statistics

while all along, in the cards, the Shirelles

with Number One on Billboard's Top 100 Chart

for 1960: Will You Love Me Tomorrow? . . .

Antonio Palmerini

An article on a poem's first line by Elisa Gabbert in The New York Times Book Review from February 12, 2023 reminded me of Raymond Carver reading My Boat at UAlbany in 1987:

My Boat

by Raymond Carver

My boat is being made to order. Right now it's about to leave 

The hands of its builders. I've reserved a special place 

for it down at the marina. It's going to have plenty of room 

on it for all my friends: Richard, Bill, Chuck, Toby, Jim, Hayden, 

Gary, George, Harold, Don, Dick, Scott, Geoffrey, Jack, 

Paul, Jay, Morris, and Alfredo. All my friends! They know who they are. 

Tess, of course. I wouldn't go anyplace without her. 

And Kristina, Merry, Catherine, Diane, Sally, Annick,

Pat, Judith, Susie, Lynne, Annie Jane, Mona. 

Doug and Amy! They're family, but they're also my friends, 

and they like a good time. There's room on my boat 

for just about everyone. I'm serious about this! 

There'll be a place on board for everyone's stories. 

My own, but also the ones belonging to my friends. 

Short stories, and the ones that go on and on. The true 

and the made-up. The ones already finished,

and the ones still being written. 

Poems, too! Lyric poems, and the longer, darker narratives. 

For my painter friends, paints and canvases will be on board my boat. 

We'll have fried chicken, lunch meat, cheeses, rolls, 

French bread. Every good thing that my friends like and I like. 

And a big basket of fruit, in case anyone wants fruit. 

In case anyone wants to say he or she ate an apple, 

or some grapes, on my boat. Whatever my friends want, 

name it, and it'll be there. Soda pop of all kinds. 

Beer and wine, sure. No one will be denied anything, on my boat. 

We'll go out into the sunny harbor and have fun, that's the idea. 

Just have a good time all around. Not thinking 

about this or that or getting ahead or falling behind. 

Fishing poles if anyone wants to fish. The fish are out there! 

We may even go a little way down the coast, on my boat. 

But nothing dangerous, nothing too serious. 

The idea is simply to enjoy ourselves and not get scared. 

We'll eat and drink and laugh a lot, on my boat. 

I've always wanted to take at least one trip like this, 

with my friends, on my boat. If we want to 

we'll listen to Schumann on the CBC. 

But if that doesn't work out, okay, 

we'll switch to KRAB, The Who, and the Rolling Stones. 

Whatever makes my friends happy! Maybe everyone 

will have their own radio on my boat. In any case, 

we're going to have a big time. People are going to have fun, 

and do what they want to do, on my boat.