"Il cenno d'una / vita strozzata per te sorta, e il vento / la porta con la cenere degli astri." - Eugenio Montale*
But those closer to home require more focused inattention.
The screams are for help, not only for glee.
The turning of each cheek needs a steady regime of slaps.
If you touch the spark, you are gone.
The thing glows on, impervious
As it watches how you react, judges your every move.
Your truth always flashes a little further off.
And what you break is never what you'd dreamed.
It is only something broken.
The angel with the golden harp
Floats through the air as before.
For what you tried to teach wasn't flesh
But a vagrant spirit, a part of yours,
And though there are a thousand reasons why you're not like her
There's nothing she will do you haven't done.
And yet she spins so far away,
Her music terrifies.
She dances on your very last nerve,
As if you'll take her hand.
* "this is the call / of some strangled life that emerged on your behalf, / and the wind whirls it away with the ashes of the stars." (trans. William Arrowsmith)
