Sigur Rós

1.

An hour until showtime. What friends will later describe

as puberal, the soft down of their hairlines

becomes an experience all its own as they throb 

in their clothes and writhed in stadium seats, 

separately, but each tied to a fabric of incoherent saga.

Soundscapes as vast as a snow confounded terrain, 

the Icelandic band that came to urbane Texas

and all the poster children for hip, foreign music trips

who wouldn't dare to actually buy a baggie’s worth

of good drugs. But, I saw it in a movie about sadness, 

playing as the protagonist realizes what he’s lost

and how all the misadventures to far flung Ithaka 

distract from what the water is really doing to the shore, 

sounds of gentle kissing and a chorus of goodbyes. 

2. 

I found two tickets in the bathroom stall, Sigur Rós, 

at a coffee shop that let a human-size rendition of Jesus

hang in their galley just behind the cash register,

where I would go and read poetry and sit and smoke

in the brick courtyard as women wearing seven

skirts would arrange their weekend farmer’s markets. 

I didn’t know if it were a trick or if the scammers

were watching. I didn’t know if I should leave

the reverie and untrammeled time I fight so hard 

to keep to find you. My forgery might get us inside

before they grab our wrists and I have a mind to look

at you and apologize. Or else, we catch the last half

of the show’s warmer rays. But, O my slow hands, 

please don’t let me lose this gift and do nothing. 

3. 

The logistics look like this: we live near the university

and you work away from the city center in the suburbs 

at a fast-casual Chinese restaurant by the mall 

more fashionable and new when I was young, but you 

prefer the way they used to make their spare ribs 

and think the soup is the best thing on the menu. 

Your red bra under the black tee shirt and a stray strap

I would help adjust then lick my fingers, the pepper

and salt. And for me to drive to you there would eat up

more than an hour’s time, highway up and back again, 

then downtown parking, venue seats, and scalpers,

mad I pulled you from the grease trap without a proper 

outfit for an impromptu date, that red bra and little else.

4. 

I would call the hostess stand and say: it’s an emergency, 

your father’s sick, I was in a car accident, the comet 

breaching it’s hot head in through the atmosphere  

has finally opened it’s eyes on us and there’s little time --

we have to move! I’m waiting right outside. You would run

to the parking lot. I would explain: these meager jobs, days 

being too restrained to a desk or a board or a paycheck. 

All the numbered reasons why we should lay in wait

for procedure, thoroughly captioned responsibilities

like yellow sticky notes on the refrigerator doors, 

what is to be done today, captioned, and undersigned. 

But this comet! The falling sky that killed the industrious     

dinosaurs returns for us, now, and can’t know if we risk

a day of rest, a walk on the ice, a carefree life, together.