Gloria Frym

 

Out

Sudden power outage.

By candlelight the past looks better.

One didn’t vote for George the lesser one simply

was thrown into the same room

history followed. During the holidays,

history comes to a head

more melancholy than it was sordid.

Before nixing the archives, move on

one is moving on, it’s just the move on part

around the potholes. Christmas hands the past

back on a tarnished platter one wouldn’t mind

shining up right about now instead of

receiving preposterous bulletins

from ports of authority. Don’t your anti-

disestablishmentarian ears hear them?

Retorts felt strong as ox before.

Made oxtail soup every day. Please do me

the favor of not dousing the little light

allowed at this moment. One thinks one needs

something but one can live without it.

It’s just a different life, filled with place cards

and sub-rosa rosettes and the shadows they cast.

War contracts for spring.

By summer, a whole civilization

is shattered and replaced by

not much. What’s Milan showing next fall?

Morning is best, before mourning returns

one can handle power failure. Everyone sees

the blown apart, everyone eager to eat the pieces

right up, having no idea of how to resuscitate the heart.

The lights will come on again, one expects.

Every day is a year in the exaggerated dog.

One reserves one’s bark for another thief

who enters by a crack in the window

stands over one’s bed and watches one sleeping.

One awakes to the stranger. And who the fuck might you be?

The stranger flees in terror

at the sound of such a voice. Or:

One awakens to the desired. In the darkness

one is forbidden to look. If one abides by this myth

everyone lives happily ever in ahistorical bliss.