I won my wings! I got all A's! We bought fresh fruit! The toilet broke! Thus my life draws fuel ineluctably from triumph. Manic, rainy June slides into July and I am carefully dressing myself in primary colors for happiness. When the summer solstice has passed you know you're finally safe again. That midnight surely dates the year. "Look to your romantic interests and business investments," says the star hack in the newspapers. But what if you have neither? Millions will be up to nothing. One of those pure empty days with all the presence of a hole in the ground. The stars have stolen twenty-four hours and vengeance is out of the question. But I'm a three-peckered purple goat if you were tied to any planet by your cord. That is mischief, an inferior magic; pulling the lining out of a top hat. You merely rolled on the ground moaning trying to pull that mask off but it had grown into your face. "Such a price the gods exact for song to become what we sing," said someone. If it aches that badly you have to take the head off, narrow the neck to a third its normal size, a practice known as hanging by gift of the state or as a do-it-yourself project. But what I wonder about is your velocity: ten years from Ryazan to Leningrad. A little more than a decade, two years into your fifth seven and on out like a proton in an accelerator. You simply fell off the edge of the world while most of us are given circles or, hopefully, spirals. The new territory had a wall which you went over and on the other side there was something we weren't permitted to see. Everyone suspects it's nothing. Time will tell. But how you preyed on, longed for, those first ten years. We'll have to refuse that, however its freshness in your hands. Romantic. Fatal. We learn to see with the child's delight again or perish. We hope it was your vision you lost, that before those final minutes you didn't find out something new. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...NEW NEIGHBORHOOD by KAREN SWENSON SONNET: 19. ON HIS BLINDNESS by JOHN MILTON ON SEEING BLENHEIM CASTLE by LUCY AIKEN TO A FRIEND by ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD THE FEAST OF THE GODS by WILLIAM ROSE BENET ETERNAL BEAUTY by GRACE EVELYN BROWN THE WANDERER: 1. IN ITALY: A VISION by EDWARD ROBERT BULWER-LYTTON |