Joel Dias-Porter

For Eardrum First hold the needle like a lover’s hand Lower it slowly let it tongue the record’s ear Then cultivate the sweet beats blooming in the valley of the groove Laugh at folks that make requests What chef would let the diners determine Which entrees make up the menu? Young boys think it’s about flashy flicks of the wrist But it’s about filling the floor with the manic language of dance About knowing the beat of every record like a mama knows her child’s cries Nobody cares how fast you scratch Cuz it ain’t about soothing any itch It’s about how many hairstyles are still standing At the end of the night.

What if the primary colors on your spectrum were mud, muddled, and muddliest? Benjamin Franklin invented the Internet so that I could talk to folk but not face to face and I know what purple-tailed hawk of thought just perched on your extended wrist but try to fit your average feet in my size 17s. Fact: the average reader processes 300 wpm and maybe they can read other people’s faces like a vegan interrogating a list of ingredients but what if every face was written in Braille and you had only catcher’s mitts below your wrists, or IKEA bookcases with reams of instructions ciphered in tiny print with disappearing ink, imagine being so literal that when told to let sleeping dogs lie, you asked how a Doberman could be dishonest, imagine every smiling hint a girl ever sent your way was in a prescription bottle with a Youproof cap or a personal pizza delivered 30 minutes late to the door of a boarded-up summer bungalow then top that double dose of pepperoni by having even the most casual conversation served with Denali-sized asides of organic skew. Fact: the US has 95,000 miles of shoreline, but on this dinner plate the border between the Country of Carrots and the Province of Peas can never meet, say your brain is a slinky bullet-headed train but your mouth is a horse-drawn Amish wagon and what rockets across the endless gray rails of your origamied cranium is ever projected onto your grinning scrim of skin, and maybe Ben Franklin didn’t invent the Internet, but the Internet has plenty pictures of him inventing electricity which is almost the same thing, say your friend Cynthia R. claims it will storm later and you hear Oran Juice Jones singing “I saw you (and him) walking in the rain” and you beam a lighthouse smile, only Cynthia says, “Seriously, I saw it on the news,” while all you smell is full-length fur coats matted by a downpour in MacArthur Park and now Cynthia R. wants to know what’s so funny but who can say Oran Juice Jones without a concentrated face so you try to collect the loose nickels and pennies of thought spilling from your front pocket but Cynthia fires up her smartphone to show you the seven-day forecast and now the foil-covered pots on the back of her electric range are beginning to boil and you say, “No, I believe you,” but she believes in tone of voice the way Crayola once believed in a peach crayon called “Flesh” or the way banks believe in daily deposits left by a river’s most assiduous visits. Fact: the city of Pittsburgh has over 400 bridges, let’s say you arch quick when softly pricked as if any foreign finger were a cattle prod and maybe Ben Franklin didn’t invent electricity but he certainly earned a shiny penny by cutting out the lights during thunderstorms, only your steady tone is mono as a Sinatra single on the platter of a hand-cranked Victrola, and Cynthia cocks her head like a small dog that is not boarding your single-storied boat and now you’re a wind-whipped antenna on an empty dinghy bobbing dockside as she steams out of range of your radio’s befuddled dial.

After she left the first thing Ahmad Jamal played was a bridge: he fingered water falling over a cantilever & made a dark blue truth transparent. I try to suspend belief across a span of hand- written notes. At noon, I cross myself over a painted bridge in Pittsburgh, sauntering from Station Square to Smithfield St haunted by a smell along the Monongahela. These streets cobble stone memories, work overtime in my olfactories. Once, my piano-playing girlfriend fingered daisies waving in a breeze. Then in love with her Noes I began sniffing everything. But the florid truth is that I gave her a ring of rust on her windowsill. A heart broken like a line in a poem. My girl left me, & Ahmad Jamal was playing “Wave” on my iPod. It’s probably not smart to admit this, but what he didn’t play came across loudest. I only saw her hands say goodbye because of the beauty in my earbuds. Then I nosed a wine- bottle blue scarf she’d left on the right arm of a chair. Be honest, would you have sniffed it? What song doesn’t long for the long fingers of a pianist? A cantilever here only holds up meaning. I smelled farewell in a coffee shop as she high-heeled east. Sunlight buttered loafing pedestrians, shadowed crossing things as I wondered whether Jamal’s main fault was living too long and weathering, if his main technique was to cleave themes or to refrain. As he plays, the heart gives out a rapid repeat. A piano bench pines to be dusted with notes, can it buckle up such wont? Maybe there are facets of bridges one will always truss, something phonic and unforgettable about how they allow us to cross. A wave of daisies in a vase — how they ravel aromatic in the mind. Ahmad Jamal waving across the room: me damned, & roiling underneath like a river. Maybe I dreamt this. But when I licked my fingertips to turn the page, they became daisies pushing between bricks on a twilit bridge.