The Sidewalk

The sidewalk never forgets
the grasshopper’s half-form
and two hand prints pressed
in crushed stone. It remembers for awhile
the silver paths of slugs glazed under moonlight,
street-lit rhinestone studs of shattered glass,
children’s chalk drawing fading
under sprinklers.

It remembers tricycle tracks after puddles,
ant piles sugared away from kitchens,
break your mama’s back cracks,
and oblique outlines of dripping summer
bodies absorbing its stored warmth.

On a lazy morning I lay my face
soft against its rough one
and listen for two drunks
holding each other’s
laughter and the skip-a-rope slap and song
of Cinderella dressed in yellah
or my mother reminding me
always, to keep to the right.

I listen for the step-tap of buzzard lady and cane,
the rumble of skateboards escaping
and three boys beating
inverted pickle bucket drums –
unconscious rhythms
in my step the rest of the day.
I press an ear to the course of stone
stretched parallel to the facades of our lives –
our wet births, continual decay.
I press an ear to the sidewalk
and hear nothing.

Whisper

I am breath punctuated
by the aspirated pursings of ps and bs—
please bring me a peanut butter sandwich—
from a child faking sick
to avoid what he isn’t prepared for,
or to keep his mother hovering.

Sometimes an aside at the back
of the congregation, classroom, theater,
translated: see how smart I am or do you really think
we made the right decision?

I am intimate, urgent, irreverent, insurgent.
Overt, covert, subversive, recursive.

I would risk cliché, call myself
the language of lovers, risqué,
because there is this romantic lack
of distance—words hardly
audible, like meet me later—displacing
the cilia of your mammalian ear,
the follicular stimulus, anemone waving,
uncoiling in the cochlea, nautilus deep in the brain.

Without alarming the world,
or the girl sitting across from you,
the perfect little bones you named
in fourth grade begin their frantic iambic motions
and you cannot stop them
even if you want to, which you don’t,
because all important knowledge
comes this way, as breath behind closed doors,
or between women after dinner,
packing the meat and Jello away.

This is education, when conversation ceases.