It is 12:15 in Washington D.C., a Monday,
the day after an earthquake in Italy, and I’m listening
to “I Feel Love,” the song Brian Eno said would change 
music for good. In Afghanistan a Marine 
sergeant tweets about boredom and generators 
from a gritty keyboard in Combat Outpost Marjah.

I conjure up the unrelenting sand he describes 
in 140 characters while a new Barnard BA strategizes her type 
of rekindling and a poli-sci grad at Liberty types up an op/ed 
on Romney and values,
and stories get made this way, then taken down.

Just as quickly, the imprint of one a ghost 
in the other, the way Harvard links two opponents, 
the way a fracture is also a seam. 
Songs about rivers inflect an Italian art revolution 
against austerity, 
or we’re forces multiplied both in the streets 
of Chicago or in the alliances of nations.

Or we once listened to a soundtrack in falsetto 
that sounded like the end of the past
and also the future as our parents waited hours for gas, 
but still danced to these new thumps in the analog network 
we made of our lives then,

except that time or history whispered their own songs 
along the keyboard 
and pushed us into the tangle of before, 
and the web of last 
where everyone and I are still that held breath, 
made sharp and vital harmony.

-Carmen Gimenez Smith, NPR News Poet