A list expects you know this: what is separate—item
A, item B, item C—and what implicitly is allowed passage,
but the space surrounding a conjunction slips,
its grey slurry indecisive. And where is my own personal
senior for this bus? On the sign one stick
figure sits in an open circle, all angles,
all bones and acute. The other holds a cane.
In Strunk and White the antecedents for age and ability
are indexed between do not construct awkward adverbs and
do not affect a breezy manner. When the riders
loping between the two quarter-pipe slopes
find air on their compact bicycles
with wide rough tires and shiny rims
where brakes should have been, I keep expecting
them to fall—and they do—
but so gracefully with a flip and a lip trick
with only empty space to draw
rubber to concrete, though, of course, we know space
is never empty. Even in a vacuum something is held:
anticipation or the speed of light. Though what
it holds holds room for ambiguity,
the preposition our lonely connection
between the laws of lift and syntax,
between our vertigo and the lies of electric
impulses swerving into lines like flight.
