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He is the bride in ice
Beyond all touch or knowing,
Cold even to the dark lips
Of the women, mysterious and ghostly,
Vibrating down the cable.
[SIDESHOW: A lot of show, but no tell.
A grand phantasmagoria.
Your heart is telling you something.]
His days are spent in binary code
Paradise
Where Kronos plays couturier
Giving, in the multiplicity of variation,
The illusion of indetermination;
But, really, what is not measured or weighed?
And every artificer knows the secret
That causes the Players to keep
The ropes and pulleys hid.
[SIDESHOW: Degraded,
Neglected,
Depleted.
Americans at home
in a French chateau.]
But this is no matter
For someone turned bloodless,
Who cannot feel the weight
Of evening's eternal declination.
[SIDESHOW: It happens every spring:
You're dead.]
Has something transcended life?
Does the screaming blue screen
Override the wrestling bodies
Of the centuries?
[SIDESHOW: The machine that beat Kasparov can't think.
You can wear it anywhere.]
He is the bride in ice.
None of these questions penetrate
The solidity of his cocoon's
Technicolor imagery.
The multiplicity of choice
Freezes hands to ice
As he sits heavy before the screen,
The distance between screen and soul
As confused as an inkblur on water.
Evidently, the night is for other spirits;
Let this one live in his eternal light,
A statue of manic perfection.
[SIDESHOW: Necessity:
The phrase that pays.]
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Another High School Disaster
You were the Queen of Biology,
blonde with a startling smile
like a flash of the scalpel
over rabbit cadavers in dissection.
Visiting Mistress of rostrum and fascia,
your eyes showed something
(pity? interest?)
toward this son of black bile
and the winter wore on toward spring
and its hopeless promises.
What was the fascination you felt
after school when we half dated,
in those days when I played curio
in the lobby of the women's dorm?
What were the words your girlfriends
were whispering, what was
in the cut of their eyes,
and I but 17 and an ignorant subject
for examination?
For you were the Queen of Biology
brandishing gentle words
like forceps of the soul,
cool touch the slab of my undoing.
What was the experiment,
and who will suture what was disengaged
that spring when Biology
proved more than Biology?
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