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.