THALIA
I died with them while they were alive.
Mounds of kilowatt hours
And sobbing aspiration pushed themselves
Into the picture, but the picture
Wouldn’t change. They were alive. They were young.
All the marriages endured the other
Marriages, as cedar forests endure
Snow falling upon the nearby ocean.
Fool weds Cordelia. Antony writes
Apocrypha in rainy Egypt.
Please think again. Tragedy is a poor
Exchange for mystery, an abandonment
Compounded with human frailty,
Forgetting laws by which the living
Die into one another. In the fullness
Of time—time is always overflowing
The brown bowls, the berry-brown bowls
Of a boy’s eyes, a girl’s soiled cuticles—
Reunion supplants reason with a smile.
Hanged off-stage, which is nowhere,
Fool and Cordelia married. Lear is their offspring,
Figlio del tuo figlia.
Please think again. The sword menaces Antony.
He must survive this time, even as time
Overflows with death, that imperial
Ape unfamiliar with dying. You and I
Were abandoned into this world, same
As everyone. And I imagine
It’s only too easy to take the tragic
View, as bad actors flashing kilowatt
Nonsense back at oblivion. I must
Think again. Cordelia’s youth and candor
Are a snowfall accumulating
On the ocean surface, a white isthmus
Between life and the afterlife. Antony’s
Happiness is almost terrifying.
I look at the stars and see fools in love.
Their weddings fill the sky with
Absolute reunion. A boy’s eyes,
A girl’s dirty fingernails, these are
Comedians inside constellations.
