Last days of a semester spent teaching language, the semantics
of signifiers, to students, online 24/7, their minds soaking
in a marinade of abbreviated voices, twitter and text
rendering the creating, the slow disembarking of words
on the page as outdated as the Maytag Man, appliances
past their best-before date left to rust in the rain. Outside,
the April sky is a bloated gray, ice pelting the windshield
as I turn off the highway, the honk of geese in the distance,
horses still in winter blankets nuzzling the ground as though
despite Spring lapsed there is something to be found. The past
few months, I’ve driven this road, harp lessons once a week
teaching me how to balance the harp on my shoulder; my fingers
on the strings, over and over, trying to stencil mechanics, the scrawl
on the staff, in my brain. A beauty I can make so little of
though I practice, nights in my office, the harp rising
like a wave above the books, poems on my desk: a voice
mirrored in words that stutter out, or crawl, ham-handed,
weighted with a charge they cannot put down. Late now,
the sky is still, the clouds blown over. In the window, stars,
their pyrite shine, geese, far off and calling. The harp
in the middle of the room, nothing to lose. Seahorse or satellite –
that single long gleam – I see myself, faked out, fool’s gold, bending
strings to sound.