Musing, Halloween

Your days of looking good are gone.

Oh well.

This really shouldn’t mark the dawn

of hell.






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My Daughter

Why had she come to me?
Who was her red-haired mother?
Was she cuddling in a blanket in a cold
October night beneath an orange sky?
Or was she huddling in a shell amid
the algae, amphibiously breathing,
at the bottom of an orange sea?

Why had she come to me?
I seemed to know a lot about her.
I knew she had a talent for calligraphy
and couldn’t stand the sound of people
chewing. She had an aptitude
for algebra: its wyes and exes
were alive to her. She laughed

at anything that moved. She had
a predilection for ignoble men. She liked
to tell you you were right, and then
say you were right again. She wasn’t
ever sure when to say when.
Why had she come to me? Why did
I sense her sigh – soft in the orange sky –

or underwater – meant she had
come to tell me that she was
my daughter? No way, my dear.
I’m gay, my dear. Yet still, it seemed,
her provenance was clear. My child?
Dreams at Halloween: more wistful,
strangely mild – than terrible, or wild.


 
 
 
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The Spirit of My Violin

The spirit of my violin floods in. The bow
is an affliction, vibrato an addiction.
The urge to touch it so it yields its glory

is as bluntly irredeemable as desperately
wanting to feel up a stranger’s thigh.
The difficulties make you want to cry.








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Since You

Once sentient past all reckoning –
tanned, muscular, and tall,

the sentry now is nearly blind
and pink and plump and small.

It sits on ledges overlooking
nothing much at all.







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The Universe’s Mother

Tomorrow, when you plan your daily trip
to buy another sack of onions, find
an iridescent dressy gown to walk
through town in: rouge your cheeks

and lips; peruse until you’ve picked
the right green picture hat with slinky
yellow, purple feathers, pinkish ribbons;
sport some rosy gloves; and choose

your stronger walking shoes to help you
promenade more comfortably through
more unexamined mews and avenues
than usual of your penumbral city.

Prettily take pity on the strangers whom
you wave to who behave as if the day
were not as strange as they are to each
other. Be the Universe’s mother.


 
 
 
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Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique

Fragmented, consumed by night,
this vision doesn’t come in peace,
but pieces – radiating bands of blood
and bruising blue compete with – lose
against – a flood – immensity – of black;
it’s hard to track the pink remains of face,
whose eyes – always the eyes! –

might offer symphonies of sense,
or even grace – or be so dense
and out of place and reach, there’s little
you can think to do to breach the distance:
his mouth is almost gone: right cheek
and jaw lost to whatever creeping law
determines an obliteration – whatever

mass of an abyss seems randomly to want
to swallow this: yet still you want
to follow this: experience the final kiss.
Existence is and isn’t, was and wasn’t.
Everything persists until it doesn’t.
Lah-di-dah-di-dah-di-day. Let tubas,
tympani and violins come out to play.


 
 
 
 
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The Creature’s Gaze

The thing that kills has kindness in its eyes,
the thing that loves can hate –
Each holds its hidden regions of surprise;
the locked-up door, the open gate

are equally an option: a condition
less of choice, it seems, than chance –
the importuning of a heart’s petition
may as neatly stop as start the dance.

The creature looks at me expectantly:
I want to think I see its gaze
is touched with some wise quiet irony
beyond all blaming and all praise.


 
 
 
 
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