for five years I have been looking
across
at the side of a red apartment house.
there must be people in there
even love
whatever that means.
and for five years I have not seen the
ocean
people have died before me like tapes
slipping out of a machine,
and here blows a horn, here blows a
piano, and yesterday's newspapers are as
yellow as the grass.
five years.
a man can drown in five years,
and the red bricks
stand
and I wonder what the red bricks
mean
I hear sounds now like dancing in the
air
great bladders of blood are being loosed over
Mariposa Ave.
sweat lines my temple like beads on a
cold beer can
as armies fight in my head.
and I see a woman come out of the red bricks
she is fat and comfortable
the slow horse of her body moves
under a sheet of pink-like carnations
playing tricks with my better sense
and now she is gone and
the bricks look at me
the bricks make a building with
windows and the windows look at me
and a bird on a telephone wire looks
and I am naked.
trying to forget the good dead,
a band plays wildly
DIXIE, DIXIE, LOOKAWAY, LOOKAWAY,
DIXIELAND,
they are emptying bladders of poison
and bags of oranges over Mariposa Ave.
and the cars run through them like poor snow
and my pink woman comes back and I
try to tell her
wait! wait!
don't go in there!
but she goes inside those bricks
my bird flies away
and it is just
another hot evening in
Toronto,—
bricks, mongoose, Chimera and
disbelief.

© Frank Silvanski