| Poems Niederngasse | Issue 84 - January 2008 |
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I. Choices apprehend you as in the question 'what to wear.' The clutch of dresses that rustle on the department store rack, would they fade in your closet-- tags still fastened by gold safety pins? Still, you're not bad in the right dress, the one you won't wear though if you found it and tried it, there's a good chance you'd buy it. It's not an issue, after all, of what you can afford, not a question, finally, of the right occasion, the handsome escort in black tie, tux and tails. It's yourself, afraid to appear at your improbable best. That it wouldn't suffice. Thinking of how you drag yourself upright each morning, all the betrayals that stick in you like knives-- Saint Sebastian, pierced with arrows presented himself to the emperor as living proof of the power of God. Later pin-makers prayed to him, archers invoked his name to make their aim more true. A saint wouldn't surround herself with pictures of her beauty. It's a different motive that summons you stripped to the mirror. What will you take as cover against the room's full attention? The martyred saint is only a mist in your mind as it moves forward on the swell of your step to the matching moment. Don't think of that stifling room under the stairs, the wrench that lingered after Irene nursed the sunken shafts from Saint Sebastian's skin. He died anyway, he wouldn't keep quiet, though he did not curse for he thought his agony blest. Eternity's magic lived in his future like an empty room drenched in continuous light. Paintings depicting him naked and tortured peer from the world's altars, documents of agony for the devout to ponder, while lozenges of colored light briefly stain images of mortified flesh. Cruelty isn't all of the message. Who knows if afterwards the saint endured as he'd hoped? The point--it comes back to you now pausing before your dresses, which appear to ripple--was his faith; and the life he had was dross compared to the golden nimbus he dreamed as his end. II. Without conviction you will always resist the command to dress for dinner, the swaying weeds of your closet, empty and mournful, as you resist the love that divided you, its possibility of birth. In a swoon you watched the spreading lip of a wave open to the black sea behind it. The damp that seeped through your skin was the touch of loss. A love with little leeway forced open your arms. Averting your eyes, you attempted to hide, but your body gave you away. So easy it was. Then the blackness in your glance narrowed like a cat's eye in light- thus to the arrow, its mark: you were paralyzed because you were pierced. As the fluting of glass resembles water frozen in falling, this epilogue remains: a woman waiting for a dress to slip over her arms, the rustle of a petticoat, the rough feel of the net under the skirt's satin fall and space enough in the hem for safety. |
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