David J. Rothman 

The Daily News 

1.
Today at 3 pm, Julia Greenaway, 12,
Was practicing the flute in her room.
Small puffy clouds were drifting across the valley,
Her father was mowing the lawn,
(She could sometimes see him from the window
As he crossed and recrossed it with care),
And her mother was downstairs doing something.
Suddenly time, which up until that moment
Had held her in a grip of which she was unaware,
Loosened itself, and though she had been unaware
Of the grip, she could feel the loosening.
She felt it through the flute.
Somehow her fingers had become a part
Of the melody that she was practicing,
And then her lips stopped being separate
From the notes they made.
Even the taste of the air that she inhaled
And now more and more carefully blew out
Across the mouthpiece, which had become a cave
In which the wind made perfect sense,
Was music, even the taste of the air.
It was new, it was maiden and ocean,
It was Julia and Bach in a room in Springfield.
The difficult shadows on the wall of her room
Quietly assembled themselves, and her father,
Drinking a glass of lemonade beside the lawnmower,
Unable to hear a note of her playing,
Looked up at Julia's window and thought of her.
All this lasted for only a moment,
Like the most delicate question
Insinuating itself into her life.
A nearby reporter, speeding down the freeway
Towards a large chemical spill, felt no change.

2.
Last Saturday, John Harrison,
The most beautiful young man
In the history of civilization,
Tossed back the ten thousand ringlets
Of his long, brown hair, snapped his helmet on,
Clipped his shoes into his bicycle pedals
And set off on a 40-mile ride.
Fired by the animal cynicism of 19,
He dove into the corners like a hawk,
Body forward, outside pedal down and weighted,
Then spun out perfect blacktop meditations on death.
To him the world was glorious with rot,
The ugly truth of every nascent difficulty,
And the burden of work. Alone, he sparked
His chain up through the disciplined gears
As sweat began to tick more minutes away.
What he could not speak his tires spoke,
An awful, true, determined desperation
Against unreasonable limits and lies.
The lies were everywhere – the lies of love,
The lies of God, the lies of politics,
The lies of ever knowing anything.
His muscles twitched on curses culled from guitars.
Luckier and more graceful than Houdini,
John Harrison dodged a semi at full bore
And barreled up a side street standing up,
Out of the seat, pushing the big front ring,
The way upwelling anger pushed him up
Out of the divorce in which he'd been a pawn,
Terrible fumblings with intimacy,
And questions he could not even ask.
At the top of the hill, which he'd cleaned
Like a carnivore, he arched his back,
Hands off the handlebars, eyes off the road,
And looked at the sky as the skinny tires
Whined into big acceleration down,
And then once again he buckled over
And grabbed the handlebars like screwdrivers,
Arrowing ambition back towards the bay.
Useless with tremendous desire,
He threw a sudden, wiggling comma
To avoid a fat man in a suit
Talking into a reporter's microphone
As they blindly, blithely crossed the street,
And then John Harrison was home,
Home to the tiny apartment where he would shower,
Change, and smoke a joint before heading
To the restaurant where he was,
Despite the necessary darkness of his hours,
Becoming quite a good baker, and where Cynthia,
A waitress with marble skin and jet-black hair
And plenty of problems of her own,
Was already thinking of him.

3.
Joseph Grinnell always wore a suit on this day,
Tie and white shirt, its sparkling cotton fabric
Cleaned and pressed into a formality
He thought the event deserved. After a hot afternoon
Driving a hot bus he had come home,
And now he had two hours to dress, enjoy the walk
And speak his small piece. Say what you wish –
That each of us is only a tiny number
And the choices are rarely good ones –
Joseph was old enough to remember
When people cared so much about such numbers that
They greeted him with a baseball bat.
He walked the crooked sidewalk to the school.
Now he gave his name and waited while
A neighbor pulled his record up. She gave him
A sheet of paper which he walked over
To a man who sat beside the curtains.
Then he stepped into the public privacy
That was his right, and made the choices
He believed were best.

He’s pushing it, yes, pushing it close, too close
To an affront to an unspoken generic propriety
In which one only condescends to contemplate
The dignity of others on rare occasions.
But why concede such territory to another voice?
There’s more to what we might say on this page
Than imaginary beasts and true confessions,
Gibbering angels, homemade language games,
Memory, memory, memory, and flowers.
Though no one can stop you
From lounging upon the couch with a glass of wine,
Savoring a more fashionable alienation.

Joseph Grinnell threw the lever, turned,
Opened the curtains and stepped out
From helping to make the imperfect world
Back into the imperfect world.
Reporters in distant newsrooms
Fiddled with spectacular graphics.
Joseph squinted at the sun
And headed for home.