or Ode to Countess Motorboat and Alexis (after Wallace Stevens)

I.

She pushes her cat like a sacrifice

over the soft edge of the water bed

to mingle on the rug in the sunlight

with paperbacks annotated in red

and crushed cigarette butts in coffee tins.

In the window, elongated figures

are frozen behind her saffron curtains,

like relics in primordial amber

or Greeks adorning a black-figure vase—

a primitive diorama where light

throws canted shadows over the bookcase

past the kitchen wall—while her sleeping mind

quietly imposes an obverse world

behind her eyes, the shades of Grecian girls.

II.

Like the Ergastines in procession

passing half-dazed through a marble city,

she marvels at her unbidden passions

preserved for antiquity, in a frieze

forever fixed within the pediment

above her, mounted on her bedroom wall.

Then her sable cat pounces on the bed—

she wakes, stares at the alabaster vault:

What is divinity if it can come

only in dreams, after reading a book?

She looks over to the glowing curtains,

to the strange figures with extended necks

floating, Giacometti-like, in the sun,

who, voice by voice, seem almost alien.

III.

The tyrant god invented his own birth,

invisible spirits strewn about him,

and he moved among us, composing worlds

and the stubborn leavings of his system—

with neither allegiance to earthly souls

nor fear of a god more omnipotent

to move or mitigate such requital,

to desire something other than himself.

And from his nebulous perch, divided

man in twain, giving him body thetans

to antagonize his vulnerable side

like the vultures pecking at Tityus.

The muttering king, listless in the clouds,

thus filled the world with a peculiar doubt.

IV.

She says: “I’m gladdened when my Bombay cat

returns to me—bounding from the rug.”

She floats on her wide bed, her noontide raft,

and navigates the emptiness above,

the splintered beams where every lucid thought

must interpose: “Where, then, is paradise?”

As if watching martyrs chained to a rock,

she places her hands over her eyes

to avert that ancient catastrophe,

the slow encroachment of the years

now shuffling like a chorus at her feet,

long after the sunlight has disappeared—

further into the water bed, she sinks

as it undulates on suspended dreams.