useless art

Marcus White stood removed from the
poet, his profile stoic above squared shelves
of weathered books concerning Rome and
the church, framed in a burnt chestnut
brown hanging against thick white paint
trimmed by a beveled line of Wedgewood
blue - the colors quietly sand eyes down
to flat alabaster stones.

Marcus White listened to the poet as we
did – eyes turned away from the distractions
of his moving head and drinking hand,
training instead on the voice: a tired father
sitting down to a cold bottle of beer and
a simmering radio with Eddie Matthews
and Warren Spahn and the forgotten sound
of cotton singing in the wind.

Marcus White wore his fitted shirt with
a priest’s patience, wore his worn sable hair
with a mathematician’s precision, wore his lips
clasped tight like a change purse nursing
moths, wore the light from his living room
as he would wear smoke staggering from his
dormant fireplace.

Marcus White regarded the poet reading
in his living room, regarded the audience
reading the poet, regarded the smell of
aching wood imparting each intruder’s
footfall with the importance of the
awkward pause trapped between thought
and speech.