A Way

The whole trick of this thing    ...    is to get out of your own light. — Marianne Faithfull She said she sang very close to the mike to change the space. And I changed the space by striding down the Boulevard Raspail at dusk in tight jeans until an Algerian engineer plucked the pen from my back pocket. As if you’re inside my head and you’re hearing the song from in there. He came from the desert, I came from green suburbs. We understood nothing of one another over glasses of metallic red wine. I was playing Girl. He played Man. Several plots were afoot, all misfiring. One had to do with my skimpy black shirt and light hair, his broad shoulders and hunger after months on an oil rig. Another was untranslatable. Apollinaire burned his fingers on June’s smoldering lyre but I had lost my pen. The engineer read only construction manuals. His room was dim and narrow and no, the story didn’t slide that way though there are many ways to throw oneself away. One singer did it by living by a broken wall until she shredded her voice but still she offered each song, she said, like an Appalachian artifact. Like trash along the riverbank chafing at the quay plastic bottles a torn shirt fractured dolls through which the current chortles an intimate tune.