For DK

Art. It cures affliction. As lights go down and  
Maestro lifts his wand, the unfailing sea change  
starts within us. Limber alembics once more  
make of the common 
 
lot a pure, brief gold. At the end our bravos 
call them back, sweat-soldered and leotarded, 
back, again back—anything not to face the 
fact that it’s over. 
 
You are gone. You’d caught like a cold their airy 
lust for essence. Now, in the furnace parched to 
ten or twelve light handfuls, a mortal gravel 
sifted through fingers, 
 
coarse yet grayly glimmering sublimate of 
palace days, Strauss, Sidney, the lover’s plaintive 
Can’t we just be friends? which your breakfast phone call  
clothed in amusement, 
 
this is what we paddled a neighbor’s dinghy 
out to scatter—Peter who grasped the buoy, 
I who held the box underwater, freeing 
all it contained. Past 
 
sunny, fluent soundings that gruel of selfhood 
taking manlike shape for one last jeté on 
ghostly—wait, ah!—point into darkness vanished. 
High up, a gull’s wings 
 
clapped. The house lights (always supposing, caro,  
Earth remains your house) at their brightest set the 
scene for good: true colors, the sun-warm hand to 
cover my wet one ... 
  
Back they come. How you would have loved it. We in  
turn have risen. Pity and terror done with, 
programs furled, lips parted, we jostle forward 
eager to hail them, 
 
more, to join the troupe—will a friend enroll us 
one fine day? Strange, though. For up close their magic  
self-destructs. Pale, dripping, with downcast eyes they’ve  
seen where it led you.