TEN ALBUM COVERS

By Major Jackson

1.

The future is a nameless, blind piano man

fingering some groove out

of dead art from the Roman Empire.


2.

This summer, I did my best to forget

the moon, pale-faced traveler

of the skies, but remained a prisoner

to his dusty metaphors.


3.

When I can’t sleep,

I count all my likes.


4.

This morning I read Zagajewski

who recently vanished into a quantum

of light. I think I treasure most his clarity

which like my belief in art seems endless.


5.

On the kitchen counter, right now:

three sunflowers in a clear vase stretching

the day into a single filament of wonder.


6.

No one knows why sometimes

when reading a book, the face contorts

into a golden wildfire at night.


7.

What I am talking about is my funeral

where all the pallbearers are Yoruba priests passing

my body once again through a field of summer.


8.

The fate of the living is to abandon their accents,

our first instruments, then to return

home years later to retrieve them.


9.

Tack this up on your wall.

I want you to feel this energy,

cellphones smoldering

over a city.


10.

A fox is a suffering creature

fossilized in the fingers

of a piano player, exploding

into a feverish rift,

drowning God’s silence.