Cicada

Again, the loveliest manners and phrases
Emerge—the bearings, escapements, balance wheels,
Mainsprings, hairsprings, gear trains, pendants, and jewels—

Of quintessentially mechanical time
Shaped from unplumbable synchronicities,
Conversations ticking over quietly

Among the elegantly powerful,
As charmed by their own invented precision
As alarmed by evening’s stochasticity

That will soon corrode such coordination
And, again, scorch their exquisite times to rust,
Ash, and broken springs, their fine manners to trash.

Time’s machined of fragile inequalities
And, like faith, can’t be spent, only broken with.

An Afternoon Ghost

Bows, gentlewomanly, I’m enjoying

The decay. She’s welcome, often as not,

Given her preferred time of day. Stately,

Neither clothed, nor nude, nor robed, she’s a glow

Without limbs, not floating, an upright shade

Like a pillar self-contained, a soft light

With a kindly face and a kinder gaze.

She’s here to offer you her assistance,

Her advice on death after life. (During

Life and dying, death is terrifying,

But after they’re over, it’s not even

Death. It’s being as nonliving being.)

The difficulties aren’t heavens or hells.

The difficulties have been left behind

To add suffering to the left behind.

You see, she clarifies, decay is birth,

Exactly as so many old poets

And self-congratulatory mystics

Have said. Fun as any change to observe.

What’s sorrowful is your amputation

As unique behaviors, cut from the minds

Of everyone who would like remain

In contact with you. Instantaneous,

Unlike the smokeless burning of decay,

From the moment that you left, no one could

Carry on any real conversation

With you, be comforted by your presence.

She brightens or fades but does not waver.

She gathers her afternoon skirts to her,

Dhaka muslin woven of sheerest sun.