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.


Winner of the 2009
James Laughlin Award of
the Academy of American Poets