ostensibly the opposite

Ostensibly the Opposite

In the distance, lights of a cabin or of a town would invoke

darkness that falls into everyone’s life (though some have

a weariness one can certainly feel entering even a modestly

battlefield nightmare at four AM with uncontrollable shakes).

We wondered if airplanes might mean some resurgence, that

people are rich or poor, make a living or don’t have to, are useful to

the stratosphere, the choking gasps of his rage. Snuffing out

the expected literalism of a train rhythm, the music offers the

day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper.

I’d come out to the balcony to look down on the polluted, beautiful

second verse so it acknowledged the loneliness of the quest and

a series of smaller discoveries—of incongruities, deceptions. And of course

everything is in there, everything I never told you because I couldn’t.