The School of Rembrandt (actually)

The last I checked, the river still rose.

It is transition season in the heart of it all
and thunderheads are waging a suicide front.
Lightning always aims for the tallest target
which is us, a mile a minute
on a paid-mile road.

I clutch gray like the last raft to the mainland.
I snap photographs into dusk,
toward a city that juts
quick from an interruption
of land’s original phase.
The angularity of a tired decade.
There is verdance again.

Patron, my portfolio
is inscribed in your friends.
You trade thin slices of these hands
in your accustomed manner:
glorified barter.
I negotiate the canal I captured
for hire in a craft of your leasing,
and so here we are.
You are a particle and I am a waveform.
In the intersecting moment forever is made.

I have entered the life of a griot,
a keeper of stories,
which I haltingly live.
There is an elegance
in his precision and loss,
and in this, unfamiliar
to both, a tension persists.
Potential. Kinetic. It can happen here.
There are organ grinders everywhere.
But I can, joined at jurisdictions
riverfront down,
give the slip, headlong striking,
and make processes of nouns.

Observe the man of the body percussive;
witness through another
horrors that beg for reason;
how quickly we forget,
how plasticene the record.
Observe the man with a string of names for wonder,
the ancient musics whose confluence
consist the spirit of the land
these have adopted,
or stolen, or inherited,
or something beyond:
become.

Patron, move two paces to the right,
so that you and the sun bracket the center.
This is not your dint.
This is the library, cordoned space.
Things can dry, crack, wither, fade here.
But you know as well as I
it is the product that requires preservation.
If you wish me to fulfill this task
and complete the contract,
you must comply. I must reduce
and reproduce all angles and lines.
Patron, you have such sad
and accented eyes.

This city is nothing, they say.
This city is nothing if not
a seething chessboard,
a pissing match among irreconcilable accidents
or a thousand years of habit.
There are childhood castoffs constituted as art,
refuse in the streets, an averted attack
as the bellhop summons a limousine,
cast glances over conventioneer shoulders,
a back-off-and-away congress in the last
inner-city neighborhood,
jail and Proctor-Gamble competing for gravity.
The river is still rising as I walk into Kentucky.

“I don’t eat foods I don’t like,” says the woman
as I hunch over dead cow. “I don’t like
to eat spinach. If I want vitamins,
I’ll get them from somewhere else.”
We are rendered in matte by a midsummer rush hour.
Our shoes bear the scent of liquor and strip joints.
I slam back the alleged coffee and light up my third;
thank God for state laws.

I bend to the convex of the rising and blind.

Patron, hold still.

A flurry of days:
hours;
I am at table with a keeper
of theory, form and God’s breath.
I am sitting in a cloud of cats
with a man of rough kin and a story
for everything. Something brutal
is happening outside,
change falls in a predatory moment,
nothing slides through these senses.
That man in my life is in fits with us all,
a common commitment that breaks with addiction.
I am a roving audience for a panel of griots.
Hunger. A day reduced to diesel fumes.
Tomorrow this news will be reduced to
statistics. My job begins there.
One need not sit at the master’s feet
to grow into example,
to go reckoning on.

Patron, I give you
the sobriety of light in a terminal age,
solid slate in the lowlands,
oak and stone from petroleum.
That you give me sustenance is a fair enough trade,
at least in a world that acknowledges both.
You are one line on my resumé.
—not to demean you—
for you and these hands, intertwined, shall be solid.
There is a market you never imagined.
Its exchange lives through time and adores all its atoms.

It is the last night and the tribe is afire.
Someone bursts through the door with a Jericho horn.
We are towering in the world of the demitasse and shot glass.
The water begins to leak into the streets.
I am climbing the walls, making
cones of the paintings, announcing
that someone has come for the city.
So hold.
Observe, all you keepers with your wax-papered beauty,
how the huff of your forfeitures vibrate in choirs,
how by the good acts you have gone beyond purchase,
how you tear through the limits of living
old lies: you are all still alive.

(Ken Hunt, 1997) Rest in peace.