Wayfarer’s Chapel II
17 POETRY
Amanuensis, you might have said, driving home, a little hungry, to no one in particular, in your way of gathering thoughts, picking them up from the side of the road where they hang on blackberry bushes along the shoulder, like empty shopping bags discarded by someone who carried them before. For example, that the joy of a county fair, however brightly lit its spinning wheels may be, is joy despite the tents that lower in ten days and the expiration of excitement that begins when the first pigs are greased and run and the last one caught is spared the slaughter. You can’t have been the first to notice. And you may have said amanuensis because it echoed the beck and sway of the radio, or fit nicely the gap in the music forced by the stretch of static you hit a few miles past the fair in Orange. You arrive at your apartment, and key the lock without the porchlight that could have been left lit, but wasn’t. Going to bed, you play back the recordings you made of yourself in the car, some of them unintelligible, and write them down. Amanuensis, you might have said, but aren’t so sure now that there is a hand on your hand and a voice speaking softly, “Like this. No, like this.”