Friday, April 4, 2008

Day 5--Fairy Tale



You are singing Stardust
like you’re Ella Fitzgerald,

and I am singing Stardust
dead on as Willie Nelson.

Together we have filled
our bedroom with enough

dust to set off your asthma,
though I think you’re scatting

when you cough in that syncopated
way that sounds like the earliest

records of the tune, before anyone
had written a single lyric.

And when I twine Willie’s smooth
near whine around you,

my eyes closed, imagined bandana
tight around my forehead,

you nearly die from the reverie,
the memory of the time

you nearly died running home
from school, the Wahlberg boy

chasing you. And here is Hoagy Carmichael
trying to strangle you now

with a few changes and a pulverized star.
I finish in time to pry

his hands from your neck.
We catch your breath

together and close our mouths
to the lovely and deadly dust

so plentiful in the near-light of dusk,
not purple, but dark blue and so plain.

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