William Waltz lives in Minneapolis, where he co-edits Conduit.





Sorry We're Closed

There's a photograph of you and me
kneeling on the sidewalk before
the plate glass windows of an abandoned
drycleaner in Astoria. The store's
one long room with a vitrine
set off to the side which from the street
one can see is empty with the exception of what
looks like a dead cockroach
or what my grandmother's boyfriend
prefers to call a palmetto bug.
That's it. The store contains only the echo
of footfalls and a soup bowl on the ledge and
the sign which made us stop
and pose for your stepfather whose
personal philosophy revolves around this
very notion of open and closed,
but when I point out to him
that it 's just a metaphor,
an over-used metaphor at that, he says
let's eat sushi. In the photograph you're
holding a weathered piece of wood
in the shape of a monkey's paw with a rusty
eyebolt hanging straight down from a fence staple
like a pendulum at rest.
Despite our dark shades I can see
you're happy, and if you look closely
one can discern the reflection of the photographer
in the glass behind us who, of course, is Arthur,
and he's smiling. Me: I'm happy too,
although I look hungry.








Interlude with Blueprint and Exhaust


Stoned in the atrium of Union Terminal

I wait for angels to whisk me into

the cool womb of an air-conditioned sedan.

They must be lost

among the fatty nodes of the Industrial Belt.

Fluorescent schedules funnel me,

the shoeshine girl, plastic sofas, the bovine mosaic

echoing the shuffling feet of a curiously futile queue.

We look to the bloated actuary table

for a sign our internal clocks have gone kaput.

An asterisk blooms.

My arrival dims. My anxiety.

The clammy babies stare.

I skulk over to the funky shoeshine girl.

Sheís a purple thistle

flourishing in a used car lot,

connoisseur pointing out architectural nuances.

We smoke beyond revolving doors

before she shows me a corner

of the rotunda where one end of the arch

plummets toward bedrock. She glides across diamond

tile like a ripple bug to the opposing terminus,

and as if God were calling me

a voice says "This is the best part,

whispering in the ear of a stranger.

An architect tucked a miracle of acoustics

into the blueprint." I whisper back

"Are you my angel?"

"Are you my devil?" slithers down the great curve.

These murmurings purr in my gut like oaths

sworn between children in a culvert

emptying into a bright blue field.








Emergency Broadcasting System

My antenna farm tingles
        opposite your stockyards
                when anvil-headed thunder rolls

like doomed boulders over
        a hitch on the horizon, a loop,
                a Mobius strip straight

out of arts and entertainment chronicles.
        My green chair recognizes prevailing
                tendrils stashing dusty sparrows

in the dark eaves, undulating
        black hose on a clothes line.
                With such energy in the atmosphere

you should know the blonde hair on my arm
        stands like steel shavings made to dance
                on the crosshairs of a screw.

I suspect it resembles your goosebumps
        given the proximity of diabolical personages.
                Three grackles, their iridescent heads ashimmer,

careen stiff winged between our houses
        on the crest of a downdraft. Everything's
                a hazard of fluid mechanics or a....

Thundergust invades my walls
        like arthritis surrounds a knuckle and sends sash weights
                rocking invisibly behind dry lathe,

a hornets' nest swaying to a breeze
        in a high branch of a hickory.
                Verdant nimbi flip house numbers

as if TV channels where afterhours static swirls,
        vague whirlpool in an Ecuadorian commodeó
                a busy signal forestalls my storm warning.

Your cozy cellar stocked with jars of peaches,
        Amish crackers, mustard sardines and a case of wine waits
                with a brown spider in the corner. I keep trying

your number. Pale dust rises from dead-end
        streets when the first fecund raindrops, bloated
                with teleological purpose, drum concrete boulevards.

I prop my parlor windows open to the smell of wet leaves and hail
        hangs, a possibility. With a ham radio in my suitcase
                and candles in my best jacket, I look

for you between squalls. After disaster is unavoided
        we'll crawl out of claw-footed porcelain, shed timber and naked windows,
                and dig ourselves out of the debris and broadcast again.







Ear on Slumber

The body falls gladly
away from the vertical axis
onto shoals of whipped latex
like a beached whale's blubber bundle
dwindles and strands its comical
architecture on gold sands.

After the eyes have sunk
into dark wells like punctured buckets
and fingers have given up their grip,
the bony labyrinth continues its commerce.
When the tongue finally unfurls
and teeth relax, a hammer-anvil tryst

persists: highway hiss, reckless
nighthawk screech, screened whisper of westerlies,
pillowed moan sandwiched between catfights,
clink of the can man, wobble of his wheel
on alley gravel, siren conjuring igneous replies.
Is it possible that this tympan, this trampoline of

cells is all that knows the way back? A sentinel
stands at this threshold and keeps a log
of nocturnal maneuvers whose elements
show up as obscure references the self scribbles.
One of two alarms may sound. We're either too close
to the light or too far from the rocks.