Not the doors we never open
But the invitation of a violin.
A student sings from La bohème.
Better than ovations, his passionate devotion.
In another room, two trumpets
Sound out the physics of justice.
A young woman with bass clarinet
Or strange fish caught in a drift net.
A bassoonist down the corridor,
All thumbs at the woodwind door.
Every work a work in progress,
Perfecting imperfection in chorus.
Not the doors we never open
But the invitation of a violin.
By the hundreds tundra swans descend
like parachutes deploying
in blizzard snow and wind.
They tumble through the air
then canopy their wings
and toggle best they can
in whiteout conditions.
Seeing them is like hallucinating,
except they come every year
to the same fields behind a police academy
in Aylmer, Ontario,
and sometimes in bitter springs
they come out of the northern sky
like a late blizzard,
like driving snow
and meet the earth running.
Masses of medical clinics are appearing.
We must be expecting the worst.
Human shadows saturate the market
Like stuffed sacks of sickness.
The office of doctor beehives into bulk.
Medical realtors create a crisis bubble.
The cost of wellness offsets occupancy.
Clinics flourish on curable defects.
Life is the casting of contiguous lots.
Now every property is distressed.
A density test is a good biomarker
To the health of illness and equity.
Fake or not— something is amiss
Fake or not— blood runs out the veins
The appendage of doubt withers on the branch
Fake or not— the tree died in Paradise
Fake or not— pockets are sacked
Innocence suffers the fakery
Nothing changes but the fakemen
Fake or not— God has no face
Fake or not— there are natural facts
Presidents sign with a fake pen
A despot murders his kin
Fake or not— the flames of the earth
Blaze through the crust to the sun
Fake or not— the indigent go without shoes
Fake or not— time lifts the mask
Natural resources betray the rot at the core
Fake or not— a dream of peace is real
Fake or not— love is its own illusion
Friday I visited Ann Arbor, Michigan. Most of the book shops I knew are gone, but Dawn Treader Books was still in business— a survivor from the great old days of Ann Arbor book shops. The poetry section was smaller than I remembered, with a few shelves so crammed with collections it was difficult even to dislodge a book from its place. I felt sad looking over titles and names. They weren’t just books. They were people I once knew. So much self-importance. So much certainty in their own greatness. Now here they were, interred in the last poetry mausoleum. I left Ann Arbor thinking I had wasted my life. But then I also thought this, how could I waste a life I’d chosen. That is something. That is perhaps something.
Salvatore Ala 