When I see
myself in the Avalon Ballroom
It’s always
1936
And I am
gloriously pearled,
On a
champagne baron’s arm –
That’s the
way it always is,
The present
light is stolen
Like the
tickets of dead invitees
For more
detail in the tapestry
Where eyes become
one gaze,
Worthy,
Not unlike
these murals
Restored
against the forgetting salt
With garish
colors and distended forms,
What was
never celebrated,
As if that’s
all there was.
The real
lies buried, never recoverable
Even in the
moment it was alive,
And the
light is only in the other
So we
conjure a glow around the shadow
To madly
reflect an outline in abstentia,
For shadows
always hang on the goldenest fruit
And what
they told us of this striving world
Was never
true,
The
impoverished were really holy
As the
famous were cursed
But there
were no lies to yearning eyes, we believed
In a
purpose, in a value to life,
As cold and uncertain
as that role made us feel
We were
hungry to share a dispensation
That labors
partook of the Gods
And not just
the lots of the fallen
Bequeathed so
we could learn together
The horrors
we were capable of
As well as
the wisdom
So far away
That deigns
sometimes to buzz through our bones.
That is the
diamond we want to steal,
The firefly
in the Skippy jar,
It exists
here and here – moving from body
To body – let’s
give it a name and a plot,
As if what
disappears
Could
conquer, at least in mortal hearts,
The structures
where the damned reside,
What we call
heaven, in the moments
When the
present melts
And ghosts
assume a nostalgic glow
And there’s
nothing outside the window but shapes
Of what we
allowed ourselves not to be.
