A Wedding in the Hotel
Sorry, the dining room’s closed:
private occasion. Across the street
a neon squid hoists a tray of drinks,
beckons with another of his tentacles
and I enter the kind of restaurant
that decimates the seas, offering ten kinds
of oyster, every fish, crab, lobster,
octopus, sea urchin, clam . . .
The sky is still faintly light when I leave,
the bowl of mints at the register half-empty,
see-through husks of wrappers
on the tiles. I hear the wedding bass
dumbing-dumbing back at the hotel,
even under the loud wind of traffic.
Above me, two planes nearly collide!
Oh no, it’s just stars. No, a star and a plane.
Why does this make me sad?
It’s the ancient pang, a blue-black sigh
from the time of first love,
not loneliness, but the knowledge
that the star and the plane will never touch,
each one a diamond flung into an ocean,
forevermore unseen except by inhuman eyes.
