SINGER
If you’ve heard the cant of the auctioneer, the
“do I hear twenty-one,” the voice of a tenor
calling among straw, don’t you see how music
enthralls the marketplace? Singer, you
appeared to me alive again, clothed in
bright satin: I’d arrived at your party
in New York. In the clerestory, girls
were posing for a photograph, their skirts
sea-foam as my mother’s was in 1956.
You closed your hand on mine so I could
see the ruined seam between our two
worlds, the living and the dead–neither
of us mothers. But if you live in my ear,
so I too might live again—as an inkling,
the flame between a number and the
welling of a wish that stops the cry:
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
LOTUS CROSS-DRESS
That scroll of the lotus bud will
smoke, unopened: its petals light
a taper: its windowed pages swirl
cylindric, fever blushes channeled
up the tip. To unfurl them now
would be blissful hypothetical–
try to imagine it by cutting a
French novel with a pearl-
handled knife, or loosening
a corset’s stays, or peeling
a girdle to let discord flame
between a face’s testimony and
the mystery that swaddles
underneath. The movies show
this abyssal consternation,
soon to be charred in love’s
consumption— when the suitor
finally sees and doesn’t
care, doesn’t care.