Sample loop & Déjà vu
by Carrington MacDuffie
[ poetry - november 03 ]
Sample loop
immediate, and that's when I decided to let
the voices roll over me
instead of stopping my ears as if to
time or breathing, each instant briefly clouding then evaporating
and god the room was cold,
so why did it all speak to me then through the
pinpricks in the blinds with the distant
dawning of white noise in the lungs,
rising up through capillaries
through skin into the tip
of the tongue and in
to the moisture hanging about the mouth
in the little fog where words form
which blooms like algae then disappears,
blooms, disappears, and I thought
Well I could just lie here and listen
to this all night,
listen to the rise and fall of every instant
in its slow breathing rush
breathing slow
and the whiteness of its sound passing
in and out of me
the same white cloud
breath now over and over
now over and over now and now and now
when someone unexpectedly
close by
briefly sharply tapped his horn
defining the instant the instant closed
and pulling me out of the
Déjà vu
directly into his iris with its unshuttered center,
into the pupil itself which is only black because it's empty, believe it:
you are seeing right into the brain, and within that uncertain space I spy
a deserted piazza reflective with rain
in the late-afternoon late-season gloom where the fountain at center
keeps running on and vying
with the toying of water in the gutter,
and it's taken an immeasurable time for this
afternoon to get here, desolated and outside of color,
stranded, remote,
ending never ending hanging
over the scene as a shadow will
or a dilemma, framed by the dull
concrete stone of walls ground and sky;
windows in the facing
villas above the cobblestone turn opaque
and obsolete faces, blurred by absence,
empty as a safe,
each star is shining elsewhere, and all thoughts
alight far away on matters other
than this continually draining courtyard, built by whoever long dead
has been reborn into another life unrelated
just as all roads lead away
from the sound of the gate banging lightly, aimlessly,
and of rain's pointless melancholy telling
of nothing that can't be
seen or heard - all this
is seen and even heard, but any second now
the aperture of his eye will
snap closed, I'll swallow the image, it'll
drop
and float around in my system bouncing gently
off of inner contours
like a lost catalyst,
and eventually resurface, resubmit itself to me
from the bottom of his eye, connected
to nothing it seems as it keeps coming back, because it can't
remember can't can't remember it
can't remember
I can't re- he can't remember (remember)
can't re- remember that it's
as if I can see
