Blue All Afternoon

In honor of Bruce Baillie, eighty eight,
Who died yesterday, I took my cellphone

And panned the rented length of dusky red
Cinderblock wall that passes for a fence

Around the backyard of these afternoons,
Thinking on his single take, “All My Life,”

That battered picket fence with rose bushes
Under a sky as cloudless as my own,

Set to a track with Ella Fitzgerald
Singing the song of the same name. The thing

That killed me about that film the first time
Was not the loveliness of the flowers

Or the smoothness of the pan. (I’ll admit
I was taken by the alternating

Light and dark of the pickets.) What got me,
As the shot tilted and floated at last

Straight up to that perfectly cloudless sky,
Was the diagonal telephone wire,

Or power line perhaps, the ugliest,
Most in-the-way, happenstance element.

His view didn’t shy away from it, or
Edit it—just floated, just as slowly,

Through and past, to the last note of the song.