Comic Interlude, and: Resurrections

Comic Interlude

I like the moment when you come in loadedwith the soup tureen best. As though we owneda gilded pot with a peacock lid large enough for fortyentremets. And on a Tuesday. Unlike you, I have an excellentview of the banana peel. Here we are. Two line-drawings on wheelspassing one another, that’s how every domestic starts. But you’ve looseda tea-cup pig in the living room and she’s declared revolution on the sofa cushions,overthrowing them and trampling their bourgeois ideologies. Meanwhile, the atomic clockof every school-day morning counts down with its deafening roar. We both scream against itswind but our children place their slow cool hands against the glass of our haste, which they seethrough a fairy’s mirror. I am trying so hard to get you to see things my way and your homunculuscrosses our stage playing a wooden flute. I am reminded we will never die in a war. I am reminded thatclean water runs over us more often than rain. I am reminded that our mattress is soft with affluence. Thatevery disaster here is of our own making. Take my skull up again in your hands.

Resurrections

The hind that would be mated by the lion must die for love – All’s Well That Ends Well

What all the women in Shakespeare wantmuch more than to live is dying

They promise it at every turnI understand   I too

tire at the sound of my voicebegin to stomp and boo

in the hope I will hasten offstage left and make more room

for the whoring and fightingand also to reprieve a bit

the embarrassment ofhaving made a wrong judgment

about myself having thought myselfbrazenly faithless would I want

to go on looking at myself   NoIt’s the shame of being noticed

that gets me though the promiseto die goes always unremarked

on just like the love that inspires itburns in a little unnoticed closet

where I could hang myselfbut then somehow

find myself again in the fifth actall smiles and forgiveness