Punch List

Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

I started this newsletter as an experiment of process. Every breath I send out is a draft, a seed of a poem that might be. Some are more drafty than others, and like my front windows, this one is very drafty. I have no idea how to end it, and only a vague sense of what it needs to be. Like the apartment that inspired it, it needs a lot of work.

This apartment --

held together as it is

with tape and wire

and the dust from the shoes of the people who danced here

when it was the ballroom of a great house--

It hums and lurches

stumbles and frets

answers strong wind with a geriatric wheeze--

it resists ease

with floors that slope only in the left side middle

walls at angles to defy a gallery picture wall--

the fingerprints of every soul

who cobbled together electricity, heat, glass-doored shower

appear as the structure declines.

Wakeful on a cold night as the heat hums,

I hear the voices of the long-ago dancers,

the recent tradesmen,

the owner just slipped beyond the veil of this life.