Last Known Address

I scrub at the blonde rings
trapped within the rosewood
lacquer of the piano’s
most furniture-like obverses
and ponder the thrum in the untidiness
between number and pattern.

As light remembers again
its ubiquity, growths too raw
to know where increase leads compete
to reach an all-consuming sun.
The window, the clouds, the wires
drawing uneventful seismograms
in the blank spaces above dwelling
with their long busy bodies all frame
this surfeit of tempos for me.

Come evening, a rap.
Only faces, not shapes, may
be strangers. From rough figures
waiting to be conveyed
or received by cognizance,
sisters and brothers step forward.
Come in and sit down and
ply the adjacent mysteries
I let slip through my limitations
when smallness spelled my possibilities
grandly, in letters both blocky
and unsteady. Come be young,
not once more, but only for as long
as that time that passes
more gently than the past.
Break up the day,
for it cannot claim
to have sung anything.