Notched in the Bow of a Wave

After she left

the first thing

Ahmad Jamal played

was a bridge:

he fingered water

falling over a cantilever

& made a dark blue truth

transparent.

I try to suspend belief

across a span of hand-

written notes.

At noon, I cross myself

over a painted bridge in Pittsburgh,

sauntering from Station Square

to Smithfield St

haunted by a smell

along the Monongahela.

These streets cobble stone

memories, work overtime

in my olfactories.

Once, my piano-playing

girlfriend fingered daisies

waving in a breeze.

Then in love with her Noes

I began sniffing everything.

But the florid truth is that

I gave her a ring

of rust on her windowsill.

A heart broken

like a line

in a poem.

My girl left me,

& Ahmad Jamal was playing

“Wave” on my iPod.

It’s probably not smart to admit this,

but what he didn’t play

came across loudest.

I only saw her hands

say goodbye because of

the beauty in my earbuds.

Then I nosed a wine-

bottle blue scarf

she’d left on the right arm

of a chair.

Be honest, would you

have sniffed it?

What song doesn’t long

for the long fingers of a pianist?

A cantilever here

only holds up meaning.

I smelled

farewell in a coffee shop

as she high-heeled east.

Sunlight buttered

loafing pedestrians,

shadowed crossing things

as I wondered whether

Jamal’s main fault

was living too long

and weathering,

if his main technique

was to cleave themes

or to refrain.

As he plays,

the heart gives out

a rapid repeat.

A piano bench pines to be dusted

with notes, can it buckle

up such wont?

Maybe

there are facets

of bridges

one will always truss,

something phonic

and unforgettable

about how they allow

us to cross.

A wave of daisies

in a vase — 

how they ravel

aromatic in the mind.

Ahmad Jamal waving

across the room:

me damned, & roiling

underneath like a river.

Maybe I dreamt this.

But when I licked

my fingertips to turn the page,

they became daisies

pushing between bricks

on a twilit bridge.