bella nocturne

We drink from gilded roses, claimed to be famous
if only in order to get into the fancy restaurant.
After all, we are alive and cognizant of our golden
flowers as they bloom over the events of our experience,
rustling in the raindrops and illuminating the sky
with the reflection of some holy sun.

They serve us bread and wine, and we are grateful,
you smile and flit your hair from out of your eyes
and I lean my head in close to whisper something
imaginative about nightengales, how they signify
the coming of a storm or the beginning of good luck
or both, flitting across the horizon at dusk.

You are so kind, I say, to listen to me talk like
this, I think anybody else would lock me up, because
they have locked me up, and you frown but with
a knowing understanding called empathy that is
rarer these days than gilded gems, rarer than
cheap oil, almost a fossil of life itself.
Have some more wine, you say, and relax.

There is no need for a dinner, the tablecloth
is a perfect landscape of ornate crystalline glasses
refracting emerald light, and the wine bottle slushes
like a conch filled with seawater, lulling with
its crenellated melody. We toast and laugh.

But there is darkness outside in the streets,
the man in rags muttering to himself about poverty,
the war, the endless chicanery that passes for political
life, and with his hand throws the last vestiges
of metallic language into the gutter. It is as if
he destroyed the Tower of Babel when the change
fell in chrome clinks down the storm drain,
it is as if he gave up for all of us. The police
arrest him for an infraction off the books, haul
him towards the prison on long lines of false wires
that speak in clipped copper enunciation about the
virtues of codified and false legality. We saw it
through the window, but did not know his name.
Who would have thought to ask?

The dinner comes, eloquent with smells, roast veal
and lamb replete with forested salads collaged in
hunter green and crayon yellow. We lift our glasses
gently, with terror in our eyes, clink, and gorge.
Somehow the food doesn't taste like its looks,
the halibut is pale flavor and the veal tastes like
old cheese. There is nobody outside the window,
just cars moving out of the way of the restaurant,
pulling thoughtless animals of instinct in their
driver's seats, pulling the ever loving human
resources towards storage facilities, supermarkets,
and temples of commerce. We eat in silence, we are
silence, the arrested man stole our language, or
did we steal his?

What wintered nights billow in cowardly speech,
what summered days deflate in brave silence,
where we dare to claim intelligence in a restaurant
that doesn't feed the destitute, where we dare
to claim empathy in a city where no one speaks,
not really,

no one really speaks.