Unit 6: Selection Vocabulary 1

The city never stops giving
on the corner of 6th and Broadway
where downtown traffic is a harrowing
consistency, when the light turns green,
it doesn’t always mean go.

Where Roy Orbison wrote “Oh Pretty Woman,”
emboldened by the femme of mercy
below his apartment balcony
where tourists and the music
leave a warm taste of affinity

by the Starbucks in the Renaissance
that snags money from teenagers
who rendezvous before school.

The paths of headlights mature into veins
of a breathing atmosphere.

A newfangled story in a blink and a sigh,
blinkers signaling a right turn,
people staring straight ahead,
headlong into the bright eyes
of a symmetrical world.

And so the past becomes a mountain-cell,
Where lone, apart, old hermit-memories dwell
In consecrated calm

And now the Soul stands in a vague, intense
Expectancy and anguish of suspense

And now the Soul stands in a vague, intense
Expectancy and anguish of suspense

His timid future shrinking there alone

Instead of getting big fat curls, I emerged with an uneven mass of crinkly black fuzz.

And he would start to conduct his frantic silent sonatas.

We had grown up together and shared all the closeness of two sisters squabbling over crayons and dolls.

Alakazam!—and her face went blank, her mouth closed, her arms went slack, and she backed out of the room, stunned, as if she were blowing away like a small brown leaf, thin, brittle, lifeless.

So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped for something so large that failure was inevitable.