Walking in Economics, Sun Ra and Franz Schubert
Strange
how it turns the air away from
innocence,
the one soft hour of rain that drums the un-raked leaves.
Asphalt bristles under streetlight
and the sun is spotless, quiet
peace for heliocentric angels at keys
in tones so needed and warm
and imagine the sun comes out.
Any visionary keeper of tools
could furrow the waves of yellow leaves
rolling
in clouds, traversing streets under jack-o-lantern attics
—leaves piling against the squash and pumpkin doorsteps.
You walk miles through bare economies peeled
like dry-bone sycamores, and you live alone
for work hundreds of miles from home
—and avoid the trick-or-treat children.
You find unremarkable cans of beer, cold
new and unopened, left on curbs when older kids
avoid police.
You navigate lengthening nights, talk with people you don’t
know, hear late-night radio, want to slap it off
—but a single station plays a late sonata, the last in
B flat major, the careful touch of oscillations.
We have been here before.
You take new orders.
All the inbound passages
—really no different than any long-haul driver.
Think of pipe-fitters, drillers
all of them platformed
off-shore.
I’m bonded out
246 days
indentured to lecture (which I can do)
long riding the mile-marks
(had to leave a dark and frozen star)
but then
another 119 days
home free.
—Douglas Fowler, McDonald, OH
