Thursday, March 3, 2011

Marquee Moon by Jeff Fallis

For Peter Smith 1976-1999

Those halcyon days. All I did was
Drink and watch Hitchcock movies.
Bivouacked in your living room, transient,
I still got confused when I woke at night.
The evenings were chilly,
The backyard sloped down to the creekbed,
Al the furniture had done different shades of yellow.
You’d come home from your girlfriend’s every
Four or five days and we’d sit and talk
in the sunlight like two old men in the lobby
Of a hotel. We spun Stones and Yardbirds,
Swapped gossip about old bluesmen,
Watched the ice in our glasses melt.

Sometimes when you were gone,
I’d just stand in your room, amazed.
No bed, only a pillow on the floor,
All those albums lined up against the wall.
Disabled amplifiers sat with their guts
Spilling out of them, guitar necks longed
For bodies and strings, tools were scattered
Like ashes. Everything waited for you
To minister to its disconnectedness, everything
Felt alive and dead. And in the closet,
Your shirts and pants rested
On the same metal hangers,
The finest wardrobe in town:
Blues, brown, blues.

_

A photograph I saw
months later:
you in your corduroy jacket,
hair blond
as an old coin, lifting
two fingers
into something like a
great beyond.

_

Night I got the news, London was raw & ugly. The next night it snowed but didn’t stick, that night it was just cold & wet. I already had plans so I kept them: rode the Tube to Brixton w/ the wind knocked out of me, found the club by accident. What happened? I don’t know what happened. I drank a double whiskey for you. Backstage they were playing Television, you’d have liked that. I got lost on the night bus. Trafalgar Square lit up like an open-air cathedral, all those drunks changing routes and yelling at each other. I got stuck on Oxford St. for an hour, didn’t roll home til after five. Is it oblivion or Valhalla, Pete? In bed I cried till my chest hurt.

_

And you won’t snap your fingers again.
Won’t talk with your hands, won’t
Stand on the South Bank feeling lonely,
Won’t go to matinees, won’t eat fish,
Won’t change brake pads, won’t have
Children, won’t ge tth email, won’t shoot up,
Won’t nod out, won’t turn the wrong color
In the back of the van, won’t wake up in morning’s arms
With the day in front of you like two-lane blacktop.

Or will you?
Will I run across your eyes in someone else’s face,

glimpse by accident your silhouette
gliding across Prince Avenue,
shuffling under the slashed
network of the half-dark sky?

_

So Pete I give you this
But I know it’s not enough -

You deserve an offering
Greater than what I can extend,

Something like
An undiscovered city on the moon

A stack of LP’s cut loose from gravity

A clean white bed by a dirty river.