Scansion

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Liz Ahl

Scansion

 

        —for NBS

      He taps his fingertips against his jeans
      as if he’s practicing a major scale
      or adding numbers up. A kind of Braille
      that helps him feel what syllables might mean.
      The consonants and vowels dance along,
      dividing time and space into new shapes
      through which one well-wrought image might escape:
      equation and solution in one song.
      A mathematician and musician both,
      the poet weighs a phrase he overheard,
      believing that, more than a string of words,
      its rhythm could incant some higher truth.
      Not truth, exactly. Beauty. Yes. It’s pleasure
      he always wants to take and make and measure.