http://soundcloud.com/mid-century-music/talking-about-talking

 Talking about talking by Mid-Century Music

 Stray horn by Mid-Century Music

http://vimeo.com/30873935
Near Distance from Mid-Century Music on Vimeo.

Dumbwaiter Audio

http://www.mediafire.com/?9s83to5ymm9xjzu

Mimosa #2:  The Left, The Leaving

The innate

drive to delineate

shade cuts across—

indeed abuts—the basic

fact of the season—

whichever one you’ve chosen.

Of the many things I needed to be told,

that a cemetery is not a

multi-purpose facility

was another.  Face down, I

tried to find the secret life

distilled from underground,

but found my breath too shallow

to get at it.

Impenetrable,

what comes after.

Making a wrong turn,

I passed a playground, the swing set full,

four girls back and forth,

high in the air— their little feet

almost eclipsing the branches—

the trees were basking in it, waving

in the foreground.

 Some things are a flying buttress

for the heart—Chartres, stained windows,  undestroyed

along  the river, the red birds

lifted by the slightest

summer wind.

Mimosa tree, you have left me,

but that was not your doing.

Still, I have your image

extant in that spot in

my mind shaded

by your constant canopy— though now,

scoured clean by fractious autumn light—

I will expect your return much later

in the year—though I can't promise to be here--

a platform, a train—

a figure smeared and framed

against the night.

Mimosa #4

Mimosa #4

(After L. Niedecker)

You were my

 friend, mimosa tree, in that summer onslaught—when

there weren’t—when I needed—hotly flowered

you fanned out across

the gravel drive.

That talk turned to an invasive species

was to be expected.

Duly inspected, the dogwood  was pronounced

 dying at the scene in your shadow.

Thus the neighbors

cut you back somewhere across the

property line. 

 It must have been

too much for them, especially

the children, to see us so close.

Woe was I those overheated afternoons.

Though still, you kept me, despite

my inability to understand the root

of anything.

And now, in that all-subsuming,  glacial shift

 the sun stays low

and your spent seeds fall in the culvert

where no one goes.

There is little left.

Save something in the frenetic

twitching of the grey squirrel’s tale

astride your trunk, upside down:

Today, crack the exposed bone of the branches;

tomorrow,  gutter and scrape

the marrow.

Home 1 and 2

Blue Barn: 1/2/3

NC in the Fall, As it Goes.