soundtrack

on a standard stroll through the park i found this *everyday exotic* view of the conservatory of flowers. i like the chipped-tooth, torn edge of the fence and the branches straining for a peek at the great white nipple that houses first class flora, conserves them.

i remember being six and sitting in the passenger seat of a bright yellow ryder truck with the windows down, listening to tracy chapman sing revolution and crossing the golden gate bridge with my dad and my sister singing along. 

it sounds like a whisper
and finally the tables are starting to turn

i thought of the lines cut into a pond, with sisters and skates. how many lines are recut--rigid against new lines and directions, rejecting right angles, covering the surface with oblong laps and figure eights. over and over the same lines until the surface is scarred with overlapping lives -- five-fingered reincarnations of the same dizzy girl on the same solemn pond, year after year. i thought of my dad singing american pie, playing his guitar alone in every basement i can remember:

oh, and there we were all in one place
a generation lost in space
with no time left to start again

i want to write a love letter to my generation. weeks before i finished graduate school, nyu discovered an indian burial ground beneath the fountain in washington square. native american holy land, desecrated by decades of poets, students, lovers, dealers and sidewalk chalk. the famed graduation ceremony at the replicated arc de triomphe would be canceled so the fountain could be moved into alignment with the archway, by a matter of inches. exceptional circumstances, a year suspended in construction, redirected pathways, undesirable detours, and a city built on bones -- all harbingers of a new soundtrack. we set out early, only to find the road signs painted over with hot tar, to deter the invaders. stamped, soaked, dried and processed for a world that didn't exist, we stepped into a ring of tigers with handfuls of daisies. and as they told us, as all good christians should know, nothing is new under the sun. but the events of the day are recaps of past lines cut into a frozen sea, towers falling at rapid speed -- a dramatic mock-up of cataclysm. quietly offed and sent downstream, mine are casualties of a revolution. water-carved canyons cleared the canvas for a new order,  where death was a prerequisite for life. and the gifts of death are the great lakes, the urgency to act and the atoms of stardust in our bodies. cutting and clearing the old to allow the new to emerge -- to be a part of an evolution -- is the organic fate and folly of the ones caught in the crosshairs of a new cycle. we aren't the last, we're the sacred mulch for a more fluid and amorphous disorder -- a place to love and belong once it's finished. in the meantime, we keep reaching for the fallen railings of then:

I met a girl who sang the blues
And I asked her for some happy news
But she just smiled and turned away
I went down to the sacred store
Where I'd heard the music years before
But the man there said the music wouldn't play.


.outside the conservatory of flowers.