No Second Eden. Turner Cassity
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As a saline nostalgia, ties
Of blood not make for incest then.
Such reputation as we have
Is notoriety unearned,
Except as being back-up earns.
No dredge will search Dead Seas for us;
If chance uncovers us at all
It will not change our lesser rank.
Pompeii has the tourist trade,
Not Herculaneum. We speak
To you as Nagasaki might:
Eternally the second choice,
But heart no less on fire for that.
Not to Seize the Moment
A long-advancing change of color, eau de Nil
Overtly overriding green, the tide comes in.
As smooth as contact paper, in bright lack of wind
The East Bay matches glare for glare the Golden Gate,
Their brilliance darkening the islands spaced between.
A former prison one, and one an Ellis West,
They make the Bridge a Bridge of Sighs. Pacific Heights
Has palaces in place. It can be other hand.
So far from Venice and so near the ferry slips,
Art classes—watercolorists—make of the light
Such as they can. It may not come again. Tide does,
Or is not tide. That much can be predicted. Light—
Broad, brief—is prophesied in no ephemeris.
Already, as the sky’s kaleidoscope turns round,
And on the dampened paper, calculatedly,
The careful colors run, the even-lighted scene,
So whole, so uniform before, goes various.
The watercolor dries; the turning tide goes out.
To capture is to compromise. Set free the scene
And see its evanescence as an absolute.
Transpositions
Somewhere between the sexes and between the staves
The countertenor makes his thin falsetto waves,
As if the treble clef were warring on the bass,
Androgyny on gender. Music puts a face
Upon castration, as an actor lacking thrust
Might pad a codpiece. Character, but only just.
However, roles in the Baroque were not hard-line
Screen realism, and in art the surest sign
Of desperation is exactly to record:
The nightingale in Pines of Rome, the word-for-word
Transcriptions in the ’30s novels. Keep in mind
That, once an epoch and its codes are well behind,
Heroic cannot easily be set apart
From mock heroic of the same milieu. So, cart
Before the horse, the operatic stage may see
Cross-dressing and cross-voicing not as travesty
But tribute. And, in any case, it’s all a drag.
Castrati had no choice; male altos need not brag.
Orphée, Rinaldo, Xerxes can as well be sung
By mezzos with a good costumer and the lung.
There is a lingering unease in neither/nor.
It’s what the certainty fish isn’t fowl is for.
Aurora Borealis of the Inner Eye
Not having seen the Northern Lights,
I see them as one sees, eyes closed,
A glare upon the retina.
As spherical as is the sky,
The eyeball pulses to the storms
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