Girls on the Run

Dearest, we had waited for this star,
the marriage couldn’t take place without it. A louse
drags its lonely way up to the end of a porcupine quill, expires,
and can we have heard anything? I mean the paced breathing just outdoors,
and then inside, it’s just squalid and quiet,
nothing more, I have a bowl of cherry soup.

These halls, when the rush of spring is echoing, far ahead,
collapse into tendrils, their decor foreseen
since the dawn of history. One can walk across them, and time suddenly
seems funny, stops, is dead, or mute. And prisoners come begging
for a primrose, or a shaft of sunlight, and the all-seeing sees them
and averts his gaze until tomorrow. Thus, our doom, ringing with half-realized
fantasies, is a promise of a new beginning on another continent.
Only, we must get out of here. A man stands by a cactus, counting
the flecks of rage as they pass by and you are in another suit,
abashed, a dapper salesman today. And the volley of the shooting gallery
vies with the welter of jarred complacencies, multiple over time,
if time wishes: “Lacrimoso, our sport is behind us!
Lacrimoso, we can’t get anything done!
Lacrimoso, the bear has gone after the honey!
Lacrimoso, the honey drips incessantly
from the bough of a tree.”

Worse, it was traditional to feel this way.


Ashberry, John. Girls on the Run. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. 1999. 10-11