Elegies for Sister Satan: Seveth Elegy
“Again, we are ourselves no more ...”
Nichita Stanescu
Our bodies, Sister, such
as they are, almost touch
but transparent as they are
we pass through one another
as if on the way
elsewhere, on the way as if...
Sister, I’ve lost the thread
and need to begin again—
for days no words have come, none
to say elsewhere, none
to say body, none to say begin . . .
Sister, I saw three children
hanging from a tree, their slender
bodies tilting in the breeze.
Why three?
Did poem or war or dream
place them there?
Mad poem, mad war, sober dream?
I saw a house of ink-dark glass
and Minerva’s Owl flying backwards
towards that city with a future
never to be. It’s there we learned
those countless lessons about falling,
night falling, and the inner sky, it
too falling, and the masters of Doo-Wop,
Techno and Ska,
of tone row and dice throw,
and the angel-winged messengers
of Utopia, their showers of light
and open-tuned guitars, the Green
Dancer in her flesh-clinging mist,
Flora and Kiki and Mme. X.,
glistening Ava, fading Echo
and, silently, the Anti-Icarus
falling among the concrete cliffs,
his welcoming arms outstretched.
City of conjurors and crumbling gates,
mute buskers and alphabets aflame—
Sister, your match perhaps
that lit the paper path of names,
list I found inside your eyelid
that one brief afternoon,
knowing no more
where we begin
or when we end.
2017
