Sheila Black
	This Slow Ache Within Music (for Billy Bang) By the tenement window    the blue light thick         as spider silk     Billy is playing again for me     the violin's wretched sobbing     the whine         that breaks into high curved glass rise on the window sill     glasses of water tainted         with his blood cigarettes burning away in his fingers. This is a lullabye     this is a medicine for         sleep. Outside in the hall     a dreamer walks down the stairs     the backs of other people are menacing         the puddle turns to an eye. God watches everywhere, written in us     shame and grief     and the perfect         note which swells and rises over the dumpsters and streetlights     over the cracked bottles and the         cracked pipe where the children sell Montana and Danger. Billy plays for me     the bone at the         center of this ache     where the cells keep circling and multiplying     white plates red suns     we         are walking among the silent lost crush where the city opens itself to us like a great bell     a stoked furnace. Thessaloniki I meant to take photographs of the monuments: Delos in the rain-light of autumn, the gusts of wind from the vertiginous mountains where the snow line lay low across the villages, snow falling on the monasteries where we stopped for metaxa and honey, and the monks smelling of cold dirt, toothless, sharing the hard bread, the yogurt with cucumbers. If I had only known I was happy, the wind on my face, Richard trying to put his arm around me, the car with its heavy tires groaning as it navigated the roads full of boulders. In one town they unlocked the museum, a collection of what the dead had left: gilded glass cups for tea, platters of faded bronze, the thick velvet skirts and waistcoats with their fraying embroidery. The camera to my eye, I snapped Richard against a sky of violent clouds, myself with a cigarette in a bathroom mirror. How impoverished my dreams now seem. Drunk I kissed the German hippie, walked with him to his hotel, our bodies jutting against each other. I wanted it to be a devotion, but we were both too drunk, too tired. He said the name Anselm Kiefer. I said the painter. He belched and rolled over to sleep. I crept out of the bed before dawn, the streets of Thessaloniki shining through their tarnish. Here the Turkish mosque, there the café neon where the men drank café media and ate plates of octopus. Below a port, the white ships and the clouds darkening. Later, nursing a fearsome headache, I would see the beaten gold laurel crown of Philip of Macedonia, the frail leaves, remnants of empire.