on the
difficulty of describing bill bissett
By Kevin Heslop
if i sed - 5’11” 2-25 75 years 56
books uv poems
if i sed - the latest of which
is titled ths is erth,
thees ar peopul
that the painting on the cover was his
if i sed - 2 hours at 754 dundas st.
if i sed - shoulder length grey hair
twiggy a cocked ball cap green with yellow
mesh
spectacles deep under the brim
the bulbous nose
black t-shirt and a paunch
blue jeans with their belt tight and shaggy
loafers
if i sed - the kind of man you’d hate to see
your daughter with you thought
bad knees back an overlap of knots
a lilting voice in speaking
a baritone in song
if i sed - he sed i was told
the salmon talks have been moved
to early next week. and i sed
at least the salmon are talking!
if i sed - he concluded his set
with a single short phrase
which he repeated like a chant or an omen
if i sed - the phrase was
“is it time to leave the hotel, yet?”
if i sed - to give you a sense
that between two particular songs
the audience
or some of the people in it
were talking about what he was
and what he wasn’t
and somebody had
said
decisively in
that way that tightens the walls of a café
that he was a performer
and that from the stage
he said “You think?” and chuckled
if i sed - as the front door of the café
swiveled inches open
inches closed in the
brusque wind
as the music with its exotic percussion
instruments and piano
and bill reading and singing alternately
that the chime of the bell over the door
seemed to want to join in
or that maybe the wind and he were joined
then
somewhere over the door
if i sed - see the stage dark
floorboards reds and yellows in a
painting on the wall
the bright january blear in the window pane
behind
the musicians huddled into their instruments
of tapered steel or wood
if i sed - gnarled elegance
if i sed - he was holding two white sheets
of printer paper
stapled together and very white and he
holding them
that shaggy big man who if your adult
daughter pointed him out down the aisle
at the supermarket as hers when you ran into
her incidentally might elicit from
you without having spoken with him the
phrase “i’m ordering chinese for
dinner; come over tonight; it’ll be just us
two; i feel like i haven’t seen you in
ages.”
he reading a poem about a
past lover
a poem about a past perhaps written with his
knuckles and throat
holding them with one
hand the two sheets
with the poems
if i sed - a bird sensing gentleness had
settled there and he was reading from both
of its
wings until
like that the music
roiling rolling home
like a
tide
that washy rolling
and the musicmakers becoming musicians again
and the poet becoming a man again
and the bird with its wings now flapping
gently around the café
returned to the music stand
and became pages stapled with words and
stiff
if i sed - some know that we love
and some love that we know
and that he would identify with the former
and love the latter the same
we were there when we were there then
and now we are when we were there
or trying to be
and this is memory
if i sed - to give you a sense
it was an animal in motion
without the vicious
it was a sense of motion
an animal with the giving
and like any honest mortal performing
it was full of the past tense already
even without the stopping
it was long in the brevity
and brief in the long
a meaning
motion then
without the
vicious an
animal
in the brevity in
the long
i sed
to give you a sense
it was.
Kevin
Heslop didn't
know it was going to happen until BOOM,
it happened.
Published
On: July 1, 2015 Permanent
Location:
http://www.forgetmagazine.com/150601.htm
