The Impulse Toward Formalism
Terri Brown-Davidson
Suddenly, at the bus stop, I wanted to trap
those levitating, cloudlike words
in a box carved out of ice, watch them,
contained, perform a glittering blue dance
of phonemes, syllables, vowels I breathed in
shuddering. A dark violet dusk seared my lungs;
I exhaled smoke clouds so clotted that,
at first, I couldn’t glimpse the fat, rattling bus
roaring closer from Coors and Montano.
I boarded the Blue Line and the box wafted,
glimmered, lofted toward me then away
as I angled change into the coinbox,
selected a seat among the seniors and disabled,
the words, my ravishing creations, elevated and displayed
like museum pieces framed behind glass.
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