Seduction
and Fall
The trick, she told me, is to find an entry
into need, yours, someone else’s, it doesn’t matter.
You want to be inside it, though, like standing
in clouds of autumn smoke, where eyes burn,
where the world’s colors flame
as you rake them into piles and piles.
Inside that buttoned up nebula,
everything throbs, the stars laid
out in ordered rows, like pearl buttons
on a black jacket. There, tucked inside
your need, my need, you need no compass.
Every direction is equal. Every movement
of your ignited eye scans the sure, wounded
horizon. Come with me. Come on. I felt her gaze,
smelled the leaves weaving a scent into my hair,
into the fibers of a fabric I cannot help but wear.
Old Women in Eliot Poems
1
With fine hair on their arms,
with Michelangelo on their lips,
who do not understand the play at all,
not at all—still sing such lovely trills,
for someone, and dance rhumbas
on the beach, and pinch sugar cookies
between pale fingers. Go on.
The moonlight and ragtime
will not last. Go on now.
The evening crumbles
like thin dough or sand,
which both taste the same.
2
Are not so old, too old
but still rather distant.
high up, perhaps in peach
trees that he does not dare
climb, because he stares
down instead at cigarette
butts and lamplight dropped
on streets or bridges, fuller
than he notices. The wild
and wicked rhyme seduces
even the coolest cats
with the deepest blues.
The wicked, deep, wild blues
of the music hall will win:
look up and sing, for Christ’s
sake, look up and moan
in time until a hollow
chapel echoes the sweetest
dying syncopated prayers:
hurry up and live, darling,
hurry up, now, and live.
Copyright © 2002 David Wright
