Symphony No. 2: Museum
for Trisha Laich Rigney
I. Getting There
Janus is an owl, drilling us across
a sixty-mile-per-hour crush of six lanes
as we approach skylines hidden by their namesake.
Fifty-ninth Street is no song -- just
the University on the rich wing,
not even a prayer of escape on the poor one.
When we're there, the circle's not full.
Right or left, but not straight,
and on a two-way street.
Give us this day our daily bread indeed.
We're in plenty of a jam.
II. Stepping Back
Your train came in on time I was out of.
Ten minutes slipping toward a century,
and you no more able to orchestrate
arriving closer or more punctually.
It's not polite to have no chaperone,
so we'll be each other's. It'll be fun
to make our friends jealous of patenting
swimming off to meet rising Michigan,
where we can tell our grandchildren these things.
You, yours; I'll run a happy risk of mine.
III. LSD
I follow you, and the lake, along myself
to an address none of us remembers,
where billboards sing in Spanish, where bricks
bolt themselves into place outside our windows.
The rightest turn's a set of lefts
as electric stars drop us onto your lawn.
We'll wake up on Earth tomorrow.
Not so if I'd been driving.
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