Down on the Corner by Allison Smythe

CCR’s greatest hits pump into the coffee shop,
so loud and growling
     I heard it through the grapevine
I wonder what sort of different animal am I,
what engine drives desire
to such different soundings, mine a craving
for a clamor-swept space of loftier rhythms.
     I’m just about to lose my mind
Two books I brought with me now
suggest prescience: Dismantling the Silence
and The Curator of Silence. It’s too loud
to read and outside it’s worse—
a monotonous tide of vehicles, drills and hammers
clang from the church next door,
     working for the man every night and day
even the spokes of a cyclist spin in the rapid tactus
of a dealer shuffling his deck. Before days

had names, before he’d set a metronome ticking
inside the frail cathedral of his ribs, God
walked with Adam, teaching him the story of silence
from which he came and to which he would return
     big wheels keep on turning
2 billion heartbeats later. In the meantime, he said,
I have work for you to do. And like John Van Dyke’s

century old memoir of surviving a desert he’d seen
only from the window of a plush Pullman car
in prose so convincing his imagined account still remains
the highest chronicle of the desert’s charms,
God crooned to Adam
     I want to know, have you ever seen the rain?
a love song in 4/4 time, something
about the heartache of being
cheated on, spurned, lied to, abandoned,
something about time being a curtain
with a dirty hem, night throbbing like a cavity
and the imperceptible movement
of glass or was it mountains?
     tambourines and elephants are playing in the band
By this time he was tapping his great foot, lost
somewhere in shards of sunlight glinting
off row after row of parked cars
     out here in the streets.

allison smythe

Allison Smythe art directs at arsgraphica.com. Her work has appeared in the Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Sojourn, Center, Verse Daily, anderbo.com and theotherjournal.com among others. She lives in Rocheport, MO with sculptor Wayne Leal and their two daughters and posts at allisonsmythe.com.