Comments for the Czarina

Catherine Wing (2005)

That night even the moon was living
in a puddle, milky, watered-down
version of nightscape, flapping
its wings on the margins of murk.

Someone somewhere was
speaking of Cary Grant
in a restaurant dressed in voodoo lilies:
Vietnamese to L'Orangerie.

"Well," said our river-pirate, currently
writing a survival guide to small engines,
"It won't always be like buckshot
dropping in a bucket."

Meanwhile, a ways back
in the same line, a man was facing
a long commute in colloquial Bulgarian,
this rocket scientist with a

Wall Street focus to whom
someone was whispering, "Excuse me,
do you know the way
to the rickshaw dealership?"

Then five minutes of weather
and the melody of maritime
tragedy on the radio as
the clever-jack-chronicler,

who believes there is no such thing
to which everything corresponds,
cries out in his sleep,
"forbici, forbici, forbici."