What Happened to So Many American Towns That Too Wanted to Be New York?

—Music requires one to remain where the sound actually is.

 

1. “Motion Is Everything; and the Goal Is Nothing.”

 

A modern city is an interesting place:

so many always need

to be somewhere else

than where they are.

 

With few moments of rest

between, even when they die

they repeat

the self-same line.

 

For someone said

what we do in life

is practice

for death—

 

and for them it is like

the good Czech joke:

“According to this map,

we are now on that other hill”—

 

or perhaps someone else’s hill,

someone else’s death.

 

2. Why Is It So Hard to Love What Is Real

And So Easy to Love What Is False?

 

That constant swap and swirl—

doesn’t it keep everything

stunningly efficient, alive,

while what truly is

never means as much?

 

But if life is unaware drill for death,

why do the obstinate

spend what time they can on music?

To catch the false note?

 

Then I remember: a girlfriend,

then a wife, then an ex of my friend,

wanted to tell me, aglow,

how she came to love the tang of the false

as her newly found decadent délicatesse.