Louise let the other go first.
They passed through the turnstile singly: one sheep,
two sheep. It was too too much:
the meek hand on a banister,
eventual pigeons insisting first this way, then that.
Music coursed a curtained sidewalk.
She’d like to escape into it, but today was a turncoat.
Was this fair? Gravity holding her
while silence egged her on.
Amazing, she said, how even the bound foot walks
in a pinch, an economical shuffle—
draggle and scrape. And the mind never rests;
even in sleep, it mimes mother or mayhem.
A moment of abstraction
and the green stain on a wall becomes a relief map
of Kansas. Listen!
Were those the strings of an orchestra?
Or the melody of a coming attraction?
Louise sighed. It is true, she said,
some sums are not easy to reckon.