Tony Barnstone

Skip to main content Find and share the perfect poems. Who are the other mammals full of feathers who miss their harsh fathers like I do, who collect leather pipes & hoop dresses like I do, who send their mothers supermarket rose bouquets, who prefer their bodies ringed round with zippers? Where are the other animals that wallow in purple fringed regret like I do? Who are the other mammals with cloven cracked chests who stitch sharp darts in their flesh like I do?

Find and share the perfect poems. One morning in late 2010 I looked out my Pittsburgh apartment window where I always saw a parking lot, the Spinning Plates Artist Lofts, and a euonymus-lined part of the avenue, there at the beginning of Friendship. I knew all the families living on the block because of the rescue dog I live with—we would walk around, routinely meet the people.

Music of Japan. Parsimoniously from the water clock the drops unfold in lazy honey or ethereal gold that over time reiterates a weave eternal, fragile, enigmatic, bright. I fear that every one will be the last. They are a yesterday come from the past. But from what shrine, from what mountain’s slight garden, what vigils by an unknown sea, and from what modest melancholy, from what lost and rediscovered afternoon do they arrive at their far future: me? Who knows? No matter. When I hear it play I am.