Rehearsal

This Wagner-viral flow
of operatic breadth and length:
you court an image of it

dressed in heavy purple,
royal blue and burgundy brocade –
all fading now to gray: virulently

enervating systems
slowly through the week:
demonstrating an extraordinary

delicacy, expertise in wielding
and proliferating weakness
through the narrows

and the deltas and the beaches
of the body’s porous continent:
breeding silently through

shoulders, arms and legs
and head and knees –
interesting, this propagating

warm insidious disease:
another cold, again,
which at its waning,

past this bend, you almost
want to coddle and befriend:
emit a breath of gratitude

for the illuminating
oddly comfortable gift of its
oblique rehearsal of the end.

.