Scherzo

Impeachment hearings displace
the usual programming. Emissaries
with instruments now to a provincial
Joseph Cornell box-writ-large concert hall
come, beguiling us with Slavic symphonies,
the mood at once hothouse and ice palace.

Like the diva who danced for the brigand
on a fur laid in snow, I’m dressed up in
sequined blue velvet – from Beirut,
whose ateliers come and go with le gout
du risque. I give the “Pathetique” a spin
and await my entrée to its wonderland.

In mermaid dress swans Olga Kern
to the piano. The strong bare arms
and shoulders that give expression to
Tchaikovsky do so with rubato,
as if the root word, “robbed,” warms
to playing as to speaking out of turn.

I get fuzzy. On larger stages, nations
tip their hand, but with what éclat
musicians showcase their treasure!
which resonates with truth to measure,
something no jargon can obfuscate –
craft and cause are one, and stations

itself above pettier resources.
It is the only agape any more;
I dress up for it, as for church,
naturalized to onion dome and birch
iconostasis for the length of the score,
beyond the reach of “historical forces.”

Now an encore of Rachmaninoff.
The conductor, half priest, half
lab technician, judging by his jacket,
has in turn adjudged this racket
to be fair – he bows even to us riffraff
who applauded wrong, our timing off.

Cordon Sanitaire

Hester Prynne was a great Venetian,
stitching those rococo masks of hers in
– what was it, Salem? Concord? –
arduously embroidering toward
her eventual return to the fold . . .
Every stitch a step, every step foretold
by a design still hidden in things
– or should we say masqueradings,

as cardinals join the sewing circle,
then bluebirds with their creamsicle
bibs. Even the plain homespun wren
and sparrow have masks; they warn
me to put on my own. I try on theirs,
they try on mine; each embroiders
the air with its signature, shoots the breeze,
as Hester sews another with intricacies

like the rubrics of illuminated manuscripts,
bindweed coiling through hearsay and tips,
dirt and buzz. The bluebirds on the fence
look for words, I mean worms, to mince.
One mask is a gingham and floral rigmarole,
another denim, another a kind of origami
of Venetian paper, such as Hester Prynne
would have studied for its pattern.

I catch a glimpse of the bird-within-a-bird
that, seen from below, is white embroidered
on its shadow self, its own dark side
or like its groom self basted to its bride.
The cardinal’s note pierces the fanfare;
he pauses in the leafage before making a pair
with an unassuming female. Hester
doesn’t make like a camouflaging nester:

She’s flamboyant, x’ing out the rules
(“on a field sable, the letter A, gules”)
– “embroidering,” as if thereby
remaking rule as sumptuous lie.
I sit, a silhouette, behind the porch screen,
trapped, while the trapezoids of green
deepening with shade cannot withhold
sparrows from returning to the fold.

Now human speech is overdubbed
by winged droplets of sky subdued
into bluebirds. Now instead of blithe,
they’re anxious, almost out of breath.
Night is falling. Forced by the pinprick
abysses in our threadbare communal fabric
to wait for immunity at needlepoint,
we sit behind screens, or pay the penalty.

Hester Prynne embroiders her mask
while singers with their jeweled-flask
bodies make pass after pass across the borders
peeping back at us back-porch birders.
This cordon sanitaire between us
is determined less by microbes than discourse.
Masked, every cardinal’s a wild card as
a bluebird falls for its own reflection in the glass.