"… just as Lake Michigan’s gilding / dulled to the shading of a moment— / unremarkable, transient …" Courtesy of Q Family/flickr.
Was it only the mild indecision
to postpone lunch and turn,
planning to catch our breath
just as Lake Michigan’s gilding
dulled to the shading of a moment—
unremarkable, transient, like
those stiflings of iridescence
when the hooked trout slacks?
A window instead, opening
to stir a mulberryblack jam
of shadows thickened
with fried onion and fish,
and after what might have been
the day’s one meal, this luxury:
a little music, a little sentiment
of the accordion. Notes faltering
over the sill waste in this air where
tempers of tundra and gulf meet,
vagrant as the cottonwood seeds
flagging the fidelity of sweet water,
though now through concrete courses
underground refreshing in secret
payday loans and pawn shops,
beauty salons and storefront evangels.
It isn’t played for us. The hidden music
like a story, false yet necessary,
begins in accident, a phrase, the same
again, naïve, dispossessed, searching
the quiet between us. What was it
that we’d imagined, setting out?