NEEDLING

Listening to Trouble. Today’s show. Tonight’s a slow night. Closed the store. Nothing more. Infatuation … I thought it was … but it lasted so long, now I find myself wanting … or so the song goes. Slow ... so slow ... give me some funk. Give me a whisky and shut up. Go over there, maybe even in the next room, and see if I’m there. Look a real long time. Don’t come back any time soon, not until you find ma gueule. I’m in the corner of the circular room seeing the effect.

Opening Wallace Stevens at random, I fall onto the The Man with the Blue Guitar.

XII

Tom-tom, c’est moi. The blue guitar
And I are one. The orchestra

Fills the high hall with shuffling men
High as the hall. The whirling noise

Of a multitude dwindles, all said,
To his breath that lies awake at night.

I know that timid breathing. Where
Do I begin and end? And where,

As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentously declares

Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.

(from the Man with the Blue Guitar, by Wallace Stenvens.)