POET SHOTS # 2 (SERIES B) by Ray Greenblatt
ON THE BALCONY by Emily Grosholz
We understood at last the native tongue
of the candle struggling to maintain
its story on the balcony, in the wind,
set opposite the quiet moon.
We felt ourselves grow darker with the wine
and an increasing reticence
that waited near us like the sleeping children.
Perhaps it was the music playing
deep inside the rooms behind the wall,
blues from south Chicago with no words
but those the flame supplied,
curved and falling like the wind in veils
or flights of stairways down,
a failure and advancement, always down.
Perhaps it was the blind wall with its traces
of ivy, advertisements, empty rooms,
pattern of our two dark heads by moonlight
broken by the candle's shifting tongue.
All our talk became a listening
and echoed from the wall
in letters and the seams of vanished stairs.
The moon, the candle, answered to each other;
we heard the small one gutter
in imitation. loving and unstable,
mocking and shaking, of the silent moon.
We listened till we half believed
it was the language of the dead,
their strange flat hands like ivy on the wall.
So distracted by the task of living,
we must turn for wisdom to the ones
who wear the past upon their faces
as the walls of houses do,
as the moon reveals itself in phases
moving from a scored white vacancy
into the baleful silhouette of fire.
We watched the flame embrace the wax,
the crumbling wall surrender to the touch
of ivy, sinking deeper in its scars.
Close behind, the music played,
the children slept enfolded in a dream,
their respiration like a lower
run of minor notes, descending scales.
Later the flame dropped off, so suddenly
we wondered, drunk and silent as we were,
why our light companion fled
and left us to our old abandonments.
Your darkened face, just after, lit
to features I could understand;
I read it with my mouth and hands
because my eyes were full of night.
The night is alive for lovers. All things become sentient--"candle," "moon," the voice of "music."
"All our talk became a listening
and echoed from the wall
in letters and the seams of vanished stairs."
"as the moon reveals itself in phases
moving fromscored white vacancy
into the baleful silhouette of fire."