Stephen Sturgeon

It was a matter of wearing gloves well while lunching, while conquering Dubrovnik; of, no one would care how, evading Hell. Diverse employments made gentlemen tick: Christmas turkeys; circulating trophies; pedestal stacked upon pedestal. Today silence has come to see what no one sees, it’s always grim at the start of the play. Fellows, who wait à propos their intros clawing at the panels, such shrill tigers, thrive unthreading the hems of the heroes. Friends of our late friend are minor-leaguers never to be called up but good as types, people who will hook bras to the flagpole, bake chocolate for a gray stranger  ...    She wipes away red records of the stocks you stole  ... Yesterday, books were thrown from the third floor, out the window, they sank in pairs like shoes, and I watch violet swords on a white shore, blade-tip laid across blade-tip, where it snows.

A sycamore grove, and in its limbs the orchestra played Má vlast, so I saw boughs bouncing and tuxedo legs swinging sap-spotted above the splayed blades of the ground feathered black in moss, in the sweat of the set sun, and the players’ faces where moths roosted, where leaf-points drew water-stripes on brows and eyelids, their hands that stirred in pollen like a fog, were masked by birds’ nests and bows and flaking vines. That you were last to climb down, trumpet tied to your back with blue twine, is the only thing I believe in, and after you landed, drifting through a stream, in a mat of orange needles, you whistled to what light could float through the leaves’ screen and canopy, diffuse like tracing tissue, a scrum of benday dots, and not much at that, now that more than the concert has ended, my musician.