“What I Forgot”

There is nothing wrong with description, watching people pass by, remembering how things used to be. I suppose it’s always like that. On the other hand,

        there is no
        exact
        description

        of what
        is wrong with
        my hat

*

We say an expression misleads us, that we have been given “bad directions,” ending up in a tight corner of the cloakroom, a bright orange bowling ball now speeding toward us,

        Wang Wang Blues
        on the

        floormodel radio

*

Then the news is so matter-of-fact that there is no news, just years of patient inventory,

        bread milk and snow

*

        Snow what is
        snowing

        blank
        y brillante

        now I
        have it

        hat hat
        glove

[I wrote “What I Forgot” sometime in the 1990s. The poem was published in a chapbook of my work, Inventories (Oasii Press, 1997). Now I know why the trio bread milk and snow has been running through my head. “Wang Wang Blues”: an early Ellington recording.]