Locomotion (Improvisation)(02)

Did the song propose a dance,
was it a program for abandon
or for movement--against sobriety,
of a personal or political nature?
Was the song pure self-advertisement
so to do the locomotion you had to buy it,
after which the record taught you the dance,

an invitation to the dance that required
you listen to each verse, one by one,
and in that order. Otherwise you wouldn’t
learn the dance in sync with your peers,
the happy initiates your friends who danced
as they conceived of chambers, pistons, camshafts.

Some in shop had even seen whole engines
halved like wombs, understood vertical strokes
turned weighted wheels, like those on Singers
through which you tugged a needle. Either you
watched your mother do this, or your sister
learned in Home Ec class: the locomotion.

But when you dance with what appendage
do you ape the chuff of the diesel
that pulls or pushes cars across a country
to one tune? Is the magic in the arms
of the steam trains, in oiled arms that turn
the crankshaft, alternate strokes translated
into revolutions? On the plain the lights dim,
the countryside surrenders to a rhythm.

Aren’t the mind’s appendages real as bone,
sprawled across an overlay's transparent sheets
that fly from homo erectus, simply machine parts
homo sapiens superimposed on the skeleton
in these perforated lines, as if to say these
are dreams become facts? The song

intrudes into my living room from the street.
And how embalmed the oldies have become,
unfanged and helpless and common
as one more dream of flight, though babies still
mimic engines with their mouths, and growing,
attach to crates scrap wooden wings
that they will stand or fall before.