[To Read the Title of the Second Book We’d Have Had to Destroy It] #
’Twas the only pleasure, the only one I care to remember,
hearing Cassy sing, from one to seven or maybe two to eight,
wringing the shadows from her melodeon,
squeezing ecstasy from some superior heaven
where household sayings and the glass eye of Peter the Great
lie comfortably together inside a fragmentary trunk.
The nameless collector’s death was no accident—
a note found in the museum drawer suggests that
the steel pins holding his suit together gave out.
He writes in despair of “the Everlasting Story: BUTTERFLIES.”
What remains of what we know of him is a kind of 17th century,
worms grinding glass for an inverse telescope,
the vegetable lambs extending their tendrils.
I don’t believe he minded the nothing
on the butterflies’ minds. They were so gentle,
clustered just outside the ossuary.
For Rosamond Purcell
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Lisa Beskin won the Blue Lynx Prize for her first collection of poems, My Work Among the Faithful (Lynx House Press, 2004). Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Hotel Amerika, TYPO, Fence, and other magazines. (updated 6/2005)