Participant; The Heat; A World of Good

 
Participant

Four women from her choir meet
bi-weekly with my wife to sing:
still strong sopranos, one alto. They
do show-tunes and reminiscent rock,
interspersed with raucous laughter; little
(I’m told) about illnesses,
late husbands, etc. I say hello
then go to my desk, but like hearing them.
 
Our cat, who is proportionally as old
as they and very shy, has recently
curled on the couch beside my wife, or
whoever is sitting there, listening.
She stays awake, seems to enjoy it.
 
I love her dearly but she runs from me.
Except in the morning, when I’m trying
to eat (and just before she does), 
she rubs against my leg, and I
bend down to stroke her, checking for a purr.


The Heat

So much work has been done
on the sensitivities of trees
that it may be proper
to say the leaves suffer.
They turn yellow, drop, then quickly,
on grass and sidewalks, brown
a month before the solstice.
 
We (liberals) are currently
focused on the death of
democracy, but 
an appeal stressing suffering
always opens our wallets.
 
It would come too late
in November or December, when
the surviving leaves follow, and
the sentiment proper
to fall returns:
the one that overlaps
the feeling roused by ancient
ruins and battlefields, where
you can’t see who or what fell when or why.


A World of Good

Behind luxury trees, luxury brownstones.
Coy amber gold glass doors lead
to Michelin-star eateries and
a spa. I’m too old-fashioned
a male ever to have countenanced
spas. But an inexplicable,
nameless admirer paid
the enormous, baldly-stated fee;
I received a tasteful card.
See no other clients.
The staff are girls as perfect as cats,
with titanium sinews. They treat me 
not as a man but a thing eager
for perfection. Cold lasers scrape
the bags from my eyes, crepe 
from my skin. Massage gives me new muscles,
even, I feel, new bones. Rare odorous earths,
gels, sauna, shower leave
me more than rejuvenated – young. 
Handsome to the point of poetry.
The goodbye and come again of the staff is
a salute from elegant soldier birds.
(They have even laundered my clothes!)
Someone once said that all the essential 
action in Dostoyevsky could take place
in nine connecting Petersburg 
apartments. As I leave, something like that 
has happened to my city – it feels 
efficient, available,
right. I visit or run into friends.
They peer over stairwells, signal 
from doors. All kvell (Yiddish word)
at how good I look. Ask how I feel.
“You know I’m an intellectual – 
it isn’t as if the body has 
replaced thought, rather thought is
translated into signals from toned limbs.”
They seem somehow smaller.
One ruined by divorce – I never noticed
his seedy mistrust. One 
whose work has come to nothing, even
what she does to survive. The word “failure”
escapes from the long confinement we
all guarded. Loneliness, weakness; then, 
somewhere behind their adoring eyes, 
I see an indefinable clue that 
it was they who put up the money, sent 
the tasteful card. But if that’s true …