How to Live on Bread and Music
by Jennifer K. Sweeney
Nocturne
There is a blue city in mind
constructed slantways
along a rippling canal,
clean and unpeopled but for a musician
who plays a harp without strings.
The city has one chair
where he sits by the broad strokes of water.
A lone streetlamp casts
a blue arc of light.
A Persian door. A zeppelin sky.
The world filters through
his empty frame as he plucks the air.
Maybe you hear a song or maybe you don't.
That is the choice we are always making.