Revisionist Horn Concerto

What more clouds are there to say how it all matters to us? Buttons, strings, bits of fluff: it’s all there, the vocabulary of displaced images, so that if its message doesn’t add up to much, whose fault is it? I can imagine casting the answer correctly but it doesn’t work, there’s no question implied in those gorgeous, plaited ravellings. Only a little is known about them, and nothing about their hometowns, backgrounds, etc. Really nothing more than a masterful way of dealing with silence, of leaving it there, and then being off on some expedition. So nothing works. But there is nothing there that can harm us. Don’t be afraid to let it hurt you, dance it under morning’s wire, ponder anew the shuffle between the infinite time bomb of the Nile and today’s shoelaces. Besides, these periods have a way of elapsing, and the so-called healing process. Does anybody care, anymore, where it went? Or whose sleep it interrupted with a unique dissonance of its own devising? They were always photographing the cash register, some men came in and said it should be this way. From now on you’re in the proverbial fix. Yet what was promised was equal to what was subtracted, while periods of socializing in the yard made up for how the money was spent. It wasn’t until years later that someone got around to noticing the bald, comic error that had been hidden there in the first place to equate it with life’s beginning. By then it was in full sail, swinging on the gate of how much longer we have to lean out of the railroad car, swaying, singing. The foul mouth should be caked with mud and weeds by now. But we’re not going to let a little thing like that spoil this birthday surprise, are we? In addition to which the pole still turns, in dreams, like the enormous wheel of a rickshaw, viewed from up close, now dipping into the mud and chaos, now rising like a sigh, a lark on the mend, to remind us that all is well, or should be, or will be shortly, given the interest in its shadow.