Time standing quite, quite still, reflecting back
possibility like tall mirrors sometimes send back laid tables,
napkins cresting on the swell of violas.
Orchids for the ladies, gardenias for the gents.
A silence drew across them, a solid propagation of empty O’s.
The scene studied its own picture postcardism, then an adroit change
of conversation to a recent imbroglio
of kittens found in a kitchen box.
Mountain to molehill.
Charles Gordon began to sing a song
she’d heard before, “For Those in Danger on the Sea.”
Time stood still.
Studied vagueness for the ladies, long looks for the gents.
The latter, cunning and subtle, conducive to misery.
Summer-dusty motorcars in a garden
of wallflowers walled in by yews. Louise was distracted
for a moment
by the extravagant delving of a duck beneath her skirt.
. . .
O Nature! A glance held a jay in its hand. Vines intertwined
between minutes. Misery or a bad shock can make a mind go blank,
she thought. Well, there you are. There they were.
She recalled the day
she had followed a man with fair red hair
the better part of two miles back to what might have been
but for the fact of it being made of air. A trifle risky, the
reverie. Onyx dreams of ships in fog hooting their horns.
The duck was being nice and neighborly now, putting its back up
to be petted. And Louise and Charles, having little
in common except for an undaunted love
of lightning
and live wire, looked at each other and saw
not similarity but distinction
and difference.