Hazy Alley Incident

Eugene, OR Girl shouting Oliver! at the top of the cut-through by Jacob’s Gallery, you have now entered the slenderest of histories, the skin-bound book I store between my temples; in that mean and moonless city, you must hang fraught in your too-long coat, not a winner, but placed, and in this cutty version of forever, forever calling on your unseen beau, one flake in a limbic blizzard, one spark in the synaptic blaze. And now the rain turns, light but going steady on the Willamette. Along the bank, I lift my pace from devil-may-have-me to heading-somewhere and still your mouth in the haze calling is a ruby carbuncle woken by a miner’s head-beam, the reddest berry in the hedgerow, which all but the bird in the fable know not to pluck.