On the Occasion of the Unveiling of a Statue of a Representation of the Feeling of Estrangement

A man with his back to the window
wonders where that noise is coming from;
the one that sounds like a 45rpm kitten
being on played on 33,
not the noise like a throbbing hum.
That one's from the refrigerator
and he already knows that.

Inside a helicopter thousands of feet in the air,
the man on the radio tells us about the traffic.
When we look up we can see him
but he can't see us.
Inside his head, he's thinking of a woman
and the way she hooks her bra in the front
and then twists it around
and then kind of shrugs into the rest of it.
He loves that.

A woman moves her eyes away from the screen for an instant
and that instant is multiplied,
falls away faster and faster
until it becomes itself a blurring mosaic of fossilized moments,
and there is coming now a sound of applause
that becomes the sound of waves.
Her hand is poised above the keyboard;
it floats over all the letters and all the numbers.

The doors on our houses open inward
because we are so glad to be there.
Every key moving into every lock means something;
every bolt shot behind us or
every fastened chain
becomes a hissing prayer,
an interweaving mantra,
that makes a sound like
"go away."