13thWR

NIGHT COMES EVEN TO CONEY ISLAND

The rainbow bleeds into a slick of oil.
The beach at evening darkens to this lady's strand
Of Egyptian dream; she is the hotel's eldest lodger,
And she turns for home as at Abu Simbel the tourists
Who have crumbled, barely muttering goodbye
To rescued-from-river statues (guarding those portraits
Whose farewell is in the marks upon them,
No longer from themselves). She leaves the boardwalk
To the regally monolithic silence of archives to come.

Away from cruises, from preparing cameras, with no
Salaam Aleichem but of reminiscing dust from a near shore.
Rameses, like her, is each eve terraneously reborn.
His loneliness is roughcut until morning crowds in;
His losses are unutterable. Adjusting for time
And comfortable with tomorrow, she as if his favored queen
Fades toward midnight less an hour. The unguents
Of recollected marriage freshen her like a Nile breeze.
Sleep is the purse her dated creases must be templed in.

When she dies this night, when this woman dies,
No doubt the nearby pollution-embalming tides
Will exodus through her book of Coney Island dead,
Name her in their historically changing psalms
And transport her to that spouse paramount who, while alive,
Placed her where they overlooked no different land together.
Hush now to her hobbled walk, and skin sallower
Than water birds. Aleichem Salaam. her prepossession,
The sandman as husband as pharaoh, smoothes her return.

INSTANT

The Hebrew words were ancient, obscure,
But the text wept,
And the cantor sang the tears. But a marriage affair.
She and I were wedding guests -- she, four perhaps,
And I, sixty-eight, positively, the elder cousin,
And when she craved the dolls on the cake
Now, she wanted them as always now, she screamed,
She bawled, she pointed an imperious finger,
And I jumped at the gasp of a huge, young opera diva
Stepping backward at Mussolini's near-leap from his chair,
Hitting the desk but seeming to spring from it,
His hands already upon her breasts, and my knees plunged
Toward ten Christians one by one torn apart,
Praying against lions, and Nero, twenty feet away,
Feasting on their bloodshot eyes and a lyric
Gurgling in his heart, and I staggered on hearing
Archaic Achilles babbling streamfuls of nonsense
About a dainty slave and screeching like rapids and tumbling
Over those invectives into his tent, and at that moment,
The tot's catchwords haranguing my ears, I muttered,
This girl speaks truth.

- Edward Locke