Whatever I have been doing all my life I am doing now

here beneath the drop ceiling

a lost dancer an unemployed machinist

at the nameless house

edited from footage

we only live a moment

what the diorama excludes we may

be able to see

one another’s pain over the waves under the cliff

body over thoughts of body and yet

one Wednesday I sold my car the one

my mother and father got lost in

coming back from the cemetery

her asleep in the backseat white-haired

eyeglasses in her hand

now I take to streets and slow Seattle down

I was a palace I was a forest

one scene and then another a son

whatever the word is for the living

suddenly alert and trying to get it all

down in playbill margins between changes

read it back to me