Her Finest Hour




It's April 1st and I'm still a fool
to want you,
bang my head against the ice machine
in this season of perennial faintings.
the giant amaryllis    a mess on the floor
& so we are cheated out of some fabulous dying thing:
"Alice, said the Hare, you are a girl."
Mean irony! It's awful to be two things at once.
For example, as in Rudy Burckhardt, Swiss and disillusioned
(shows photo Times Square Building, 1947)
"Well, what I love about New York is that it just grew up wildly."
amidst slender cast iron columns & dreadful posturings
that snapshot of Dinah
in the studio holding 
her scotch & rocks
"she looked simply grand and not at all..."
it was impeccably contrived
and the Furies?
only birds at icy altitudes
in her last recordings, in the achy 5 o'clock New York rain  
unsteady on the sidewalk. She meant to be so frail but
only gained in constancy.
sad truth: a burnt piano key