XIV. À couper le souffle

XIV. À couper le souffle

[...There] is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. —Invisible Cities

In a Southern city, her contralto crumbles masses to down their catacombs—
Now a half-dozen deaf congregants; enough to rouse the boiler, near hammering
Crackling, tube-fin radiators in Sunday’s designated benches—She worked as a housekeeper
For Eunice’s piano lessons, and so overheard susurrations of visitors over dusted

Cupboards of hobnail glass; in springtime, with their stemmed syringa—The 14^th letter

It was not the patched collars, his congestive heart failure, but the composer, Bach

Her daughter could read the decipherable measures of this chipped porcelain Bach—
In this calloused run to the rock, to the bus line, she could not surrender into ignored catacombs
Of herself; sing in the choir—Abide a yokel’s Sinnerman with cursing from his porch; then, a letter     
Of public recital, with the performer’s parents at the rear entrance—What the composer felt hammering
Leipzig burgomasters, deaths of his wife, ten children—Folding a well-worn apron as a housekeeper,
Overhead, she catches the Bach signature, 14; recognizes the due diligence of  Blue Back Spellers dusted

At the Allen School for Girls, but now Eunice must study at Julliard—All of our fleshly encounters bear a tang of dust,
Of burnt meteorites—Roughhoused in Philadelphia, they were all rejected by the Curtis Institute, where Bach

Is still memorized for a pianist’s repertoire—Playing the boardwalk hotels, taking a few idle housekeeping
Jobs, Nina takes the name of Simone Signoret, who escaped roundups, occupier’s orders bound for catacombs—

Large foundations there keel Resistance and German bunkers—The first album trailed the rehearsal letters
Of George Gershwin selling the bottoms of Charleston; some are there still, at riveting hammers

In a silent shipyard—Faster than she could write down, the blasted 16th Street Baptist Church hammered
Mullioned windows on city cornices like train platforms, a Dylan cover of Hollis Brown’s seven rounds disturbing dust
Storms gathering there—Rendition of a show tune, Mississippi Goddam in Carnegie Hall, and 54 miles from Selma—The letter,
Montgomery Situation Report, until dispersal, by court order; the President tuning in—Bach’s
Fourteen Canons, eight fundamental notes of aria as the Goldberg Variations an incident housekeeper,
Under oblivion of lilac wine, did not discard—Though the Avenue of the Arts begins at Broad, it is altogether a catacomb,

With buyers inside locust theaters, says the grandmother forecasting from bones intended for catacombs;
With vented cremains, hopes of a RAF officer’s holdings in the Atlantic hurricane belt; freed slaves hammering
Latex taps in Liberian estates; the wind blows through a heart’s vanquished arcades—The housekeeper
Found her, in London—An improbable likeness to Mary-Lou, who lifts him up; unsettled by the elevator—Dusting

Hotel rooms, she retreats to an ice-cold bottle—Nina Simone and David Bowie, new in dry-cleaning, letter
Sheet envelopes sticking out the sides, on outskirts of themselves in struck brown eyes—A Bach

Fugue answered in Detroit’s epicenter of evaded pensions and divested redlined houses—Bach’s

Note against note in now stripped beams of Ford Auditorium detail the story of this king—Deterred catacombs;  

Dead, from having not encountered an expatriate’s sadness for an African President’s denied letters

Of Congress, shifting at their moral cornerstones—At the receiver’s transition metals, a voice’s single forged hammer,

A voice, prone and crying into the dark; confined feelings faint among dowagers and retired housekeepers
Who saw it through, without exemption—Through sills, these pearls of rain coming from dust

Covered lands, where it never rains—This dust’s deep burial and clastic discharge for Bach’s lost
Import—Into our open letter’s falling away for music to enter each other, with mute hammers’
Unsecured catacombs of housekeeper’s exchanges, not toward a hermetic love, but realness.