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Wig
Shop Choir
You,
for whom the bluebirds of happiness
Dress up as prison guards,
turning and
Raising your arms – just now – in
triumph,
Grasping a chicken leg gnawed to the
bone.
Maestro
Of the wig shop choir!
I
could almost hear it, the last glorious F
Still hovering in
the chilly night air
As I stepped into the
crosswalk,
The mad king applauding
With
his two red hands.
The
Shoes of the Old Ones
Their
makers vanished,
Along with the horses and clouds
That
admired themselves in the cobbler’s window.
The
uppers of heavy tooled leather,
Like an old-fashioned valise
or portfolio
Into which important papers are slipped,
Bruised with the seal of a bank, or even an empire.
Thick-soled, cut broad across the instep,
Bearing, if
somehow held close, the expected scents
Of their human
owners: sweetish and fearsome.
I see them lined up beneath
the pews at church,
Like sentences in an archaic tongue,
Punctuated by the tips of canes.
Squat
To
chase the first night jitters I drank apple wine
And stacked
my fingers one on the other
Like lobster claws and waved
Them
over my head menacingly.
I stomped my feet
And made the
rat turds dance.
An icy draft circled the room
Like a
terrified bird.
The cupboards were bare, of course,
And so
were the walls,
Except for the dime store Jesus
On the
Cross somebody gave a hotfoot to.
Long minutes
passed.
In a dark windowpane I watched myself
Turning
pages struck golden by candlelight.
I could have been the Duc
de Barry
Admiring a well-turned field, a forest
Of turrets
under an azure sky,
But I wasn’t. Instead there
was a photograph
Of a schoolboy holding a machine gun
while
Puffing on a fat cigar,
And later on one of a
woman leaning forward
On a three-legged chair
Holding
beside her cheek like a puppet
A picture of her long-faced
husband,
Their two mouths
Half open to a street filled
with burning garbage,
As if they’d both lurched up
Out
of the same nightmare.
The Lord Almighty himself
Looking
a little nervous too, I noticed,
Peering fretfully over his
shoulder
In the wavering light,
This way and then that,
As
if missing the company
Of the Good Thief,
And, then, even
the Bad.
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