"Couples Fugue"

Couples Fugue

“Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant.”––John Updike

In every marriage one is royal while the other is loyal.

One and other rotate periodically around a periodic table

…the royal sits at the head, loyal at the side, until a fugue

starts a round of musical chairs; and this is where they

see eye to eye, watching each other for a cue to stop

the music, as if the royal or the loyal were an impostor,

and a wizened magician composed of the chemistry

that attracted them at first wields a staff that wriggles

like a snake…smack in the middle of their shenanigans.

~ LCMH

This poem is also featured in today's column "Next Line, Please" of The American Scholar:
https://theamericanscholar.org/patricians-and-peasants/#.XRujSqeZN98

In Hard Times

“Hard times require furious dancing” - Alice Walker

If
fury freezes
to chilling
meanness,
it ices the knees
from genuflecting,
from reflecting.

For
how does personhood (of a place
like the united of states)
return to its embryo,
to be doctored
into the falseness
of itself?    

A
false god
stiffening the fabric
of society, wearing us out.

Better
for peopled limbs
to exhaust into dancing.

We,
thereby, will not mean
anything.

Humbled
to exhume a new creed
of wonderment.

~ LCMH

   

A Nod to Simic

Get me a room at Hotel Eternity––Charles Simic

The line above is from Simic's poem "Autumn Sky," and is both the title and jumping off point for the poem previously shared here––now featured in my chapbook Muse in a Suitcase.

I also think of this Andrew Wyeth painting while visiting my poem's room at Hotel Eternity. 

Epigraph

“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire” - Charles Bukowski

Or, how well the fire walks through you

as an inkling that patterns itself
on the back of a box turtle
in the middle of a gravel road

- you slow the car to a stop,
slide out, set the turtle on the grass, get
behind the wheel - this treatise from the meadow,

these measures you take to spare a life.

~ LCMH