Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Run on, brave sentence, run on....

This is a quickie. I had to work to get the meter more or less right, and in the process I've left some lazy language in there ("bright" needs to be swapped out). But it meets the Brewer prompt, which is "end of the line."

The Neverending Fender Solo

What matters isn’t that he plays it loud.
What matters isn’t speed. What matters is
the way, when all seems done, he comes around
to find a lagniappe, a hidden clover
bearing four leaves, deep buried among threes;
as if God gave him elemental breath
attenuated, never labored, bright;
as if each of us dreamed of being trapped,
our streetcar barreling down Lombard Street,
with switchback after switchback bringing thrills,
or fatalism, fear, raw ecstasy,
and when it seemed we’d hit the water’s edge,
that trolley would create another track
stretching before us, unbelievable,
longer than any one of us could breathe.

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