bossa ballade Triste é saber que ninguém pode viver de ilusão Que nunca vai ser, nunca vai dar O sonhador tem que acordar Jobim
green guitar: a foliage of notes spreading into twilight, notes chocolate, blue smoke, yellow orchid, a single mayfly, a heart in my hand transfixed with a half note’s stem, calla lily in perpetual shade & the sunset’s tendrils as she lets down her hair—your name inscribed on the one planet visible to the east, the airplane glides past never touching down as we speak, waking from one dream to the next to the next
& so far so good—a mockingbird in the willow singing ultra-violet: triste é viver na solidão—a water- fall drifting through rocks hollow like cups that can’t contain water long, which is the garden’s sad melody amongst rhododendrons—the blue streetcar’s sighs transformed to major 7 chords in the hills, these sunflowers gone black against a pale sky as we speak, waking from one dream to the next to the next
your beauty itself an airplane—perplexity in a sky so clear, a quarter note’s fade, a willow’s witness to this sunset—a word arriving from silence becoming magnolias, a blue train lost in a forest, a teakettle’s vapor, a crimson cloche—what wonder: a common language—this evening star so green, guitar so green, airplane gone as we speak, waking from one dream to the next to the next
how can the mockingbird be lonely being many o dreamer awaken like a guitar strummed at dusk how that airplane soars close by the planet as we speak, waking from one dream to the next to the next
multiple scarlet dimensions of the rhododendron corolla the sound of one hand plucking “Down by the Riverside” on classical guitar & whatever took place at daybreak has floated far downstream with ducks & a Chinese junk & flotsam—
the Morrison Bridges unfolds its bascules skyward— another form of “hello,” for instance a baseball's seams’ whirring uncomfortably close to the body on a serene May evening when you’ve yet to consider twilight—
startling as the sun reflected in a puddle in the little league diamond’s righthand batter’s box—a woman you scarcely know poised on the curb waiting to come across—illusion of a rising fastball sailing between the dimensions—it was another twilight, ever-
green Vermont air, a dirt road, the tree frogs change-ringing peal the time my father went deaf with the windows rolled down— underwater—Willamette River heaving gray toward the Columbia under the celadon spires of St John’s Bridge
coast to coast—a 12 to 6 curveball falling like any other egg onto a laminate floor—but dragon boats will surge up- stream in June after all while roses unfold—the ghostly spring run of kinamasu salmon in quantum space
Image links to its source on Wiki Commons Egoyomi
by Suzuki Harunobu, based on a mitate showing 10th century calligraphy
expert Ono no Tôfu as a frog missing its aim several times before
finally succeeding. 1765 Public domain
white picket fence without belief attached, mere fact in this landscape with parked cars, three stars just past reach of city lights between backlit clouds blowing north-south
so I asked you where the moon will come up—“above the weeping cherry”—just now weeping without benefit of blossoms in an evening fraught with gusts
as if weather were changing into something it’s not—camellia buds clenched into green fists, bamboo on Mississippi Ave green all winter, lissome, long-haired, green leaves
beyond belief, groaning bus at the light on Skidmore—me walking into the future past that sushi place we ate ramen an- other winter evening the fish tank brimming orange & blue, in-
Image links to its source on Wiki Commons illustration
of a tromba marina (marine trumpet) from Olga Racster's "Chats on Big
and Little Fiddles" Frederick A. Stokes, NY 1922 - public domain
these dormer windows, the afternoon sun’s flash splashing across their eyes. the sidewalk’s impassive at any rate, despite a crazy quilt of house colors looked at asquint, and bare gnarled cherry boughs.
the young woman, lavender wool cap askew, walks a black lab, who has other ideas entirely. the girl on the bike calls in Spanish to the boy steering a kick scooter over chalk hearts and flowers and cracked pavement.
the half moon’s a silver parachute, it goes without saying, and six people with plastic shopping baskets mingle in the market amongst eggplants and egg cartons and an actual vinyl lp playing Bob Dylan.
you might be asleep: lilac purple of early crocuses, plaid-coated plywood clown, paint-chipped, in a garden; how moss shimmers like seaplants atop a stone retaining wall, the couple returning from the café,
their coffee in red to-go cups, camellias blooming on a front yard across the way beside the birdbath. you count the steps you take. history is always like this, in motion in increments along this sidewalk.
