Katherine Holmes

Suite

Rental walls of restraint

the bluffing urban buzzer

fight reflex suppressed

a salt-over-the-shoulder glance to the door.

Framed mirage ambiences

arranged recordings and Chabrier's

"Suite Pastorale" glowering after the manipulated news

and disillusionments. Gender-separate

as a clef I walk at domestic speed

past snowsuits when it is not 1959.

The storefronts are veiled in chill for spring openings and

impermanent people stubborn

as blue flowers near Lake Harriet.

Delphiniums will grow tall as spattered bowties and the senile.

Bachelor buttons will bring

the cerebral down to earth.

Mirror flowers beyond the spouting Greek tyke will be powder blue

flatteries. Most straggling

females won't stroll the bird's eye woods

and every vagabond can borrow from the rich and the rustic

under the Grand Canyon of sky.

The speedwell will give send-offs.

One goes in the way one grows

back to baby boomer shabbiness fencing the bedded blue.

Towards jeopardy

   In pairs they drift

on lethargic August's sonar

   along an arbor

to put up their reversible

   monarch wings -

   a batik

of banana-yellow

   crescents.

In serapes of twilight

   the butterflies

wrap themselves

asleep in the trees.

   On an overhang

bed-of-nails stark,

   twig-forked,

one has made a tent

   of its wings.

Another clasps shadow,

deflated on a leaf pose.

   I rest in the

boxed-up insolence

   of moving

on a green couch

   to be left

   at the hardwood

for the Salvation Army

   when another

pulsing of monarch pilgrims

bunk outside.

To slumber in the sumac,

I murmur at the screen.

   A tent flap stirs,

the one at the sparse twig.

Its svelte

harvest-orange opens

   leaving the other

   dreaming.

Then it yawns and shuts

   on a barer

stick of cot nearer

   the window.

Salesclerk clown

Empathy pudding

then the harmonica gasp

he has in the hangdog lounge.

Music peddlers,

nightnapped rubberband-lipped

crew that can't afford

to throw food

around but would like to

hear the senior truant

perform pathos,

a cigarette and chest sobstory.

Variations on soupy adagio

moonlighters moan.

If they listen

through the lunch's languish strain

an obsolete spotlight resonates.

Trip into the big top

with old unshabby savvy.

Unchronicled footsure stars

gypsy. Feats gyrate.

The retired clown stationed

might one day stumble on the

sixteenth-noted

shoelaces, telescope customers

with Beethoven rolled up, accordion

the air with sheaves

of Czerny, supervene heelstuck

in a bongo, though his sadsack

is indelible. His

greatest show on earth is over.