The room was warm, sugar sweet, and wormwood bitter
with radiators trimmed in half-shell
heading cast columns looking unlikely
to support their visual weight. How easy,
said Louise, it is to be crushed.
They were twelve at the table, six on each side.
A tableau untainted by paint, an even jury
sitting in judgment.
She could hear music—was it the spheres?
Planets passing Adam’s sarcophagus, bowing down in what?
Honor? Or relief that they were diviner matter,
a test doctrine as yet unbested. It was time
for dessert: pie, a structural lemon, cloud-coated
with a Corinthian cap formed of feathers
standing at wistful attention. There was no see deeper
than this—the very sight kept them submerged
. . .
and they swam like skylarks straining to locate
a star without the help of the sky.
To the one on her right, Louise said no, she would not sit
for his dog—a taffy-toned poodle with a puppy cut
that answered to the name of Roy.
She would be away that week, grazing a coast
before entering a sea, taking a sloop, sipping her tea.
Adrift. Besides, she said, she could never be anyone’s
My Dear Girl. She would never respond
to a call from a telephone held to a distant, indifferent ear.
She was, in a word, not-his-type, and then she turned
to her left, a sinister shift, and in her best whisper
she asked to be taken home. Bye, they said. Bye-bye.
The late hours were arriving, car after car.