INEXACT
MUSIC
Was
it the way whiskey glasses
jumped
through midnight politics;
each
laborious point in the basement
of
every man's shadow
lost
in the darkness,
or
was it the blood-root skirl of bagpipes
that
raised even the youngest of us
from
the forgetfulness of generations?
What
remains of the long-toothed old men
reminiscing
in patriotic unison?
The
trigger-points of memory,
the
blue endurance of cigar smoke,
a
child crawling on checkered tablecloths,
the
clinking of jam jars
filled
with amber sacrament
where
the inexact music of poetry
rolls
back the ancestral tongue—
An
emigmatic burden I shoulder
toward
the intersection
between
birth and denial.
1992 Santa Clara Review
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