Soirée vivante

BY Martha Zweig

I get all regrets
to my party! So decomposes my up-to-the-last-
minute gaudy hour: yellow balloons
flaccid, the bubbly
corked in its rack. Costumed sommelier
hovering the epergne
(figment himself, & soon dismissed)
rescinds the all-but-imminent cascade.
Somebody has been saying about
me that I don’t exist, I bet, & bewitching the centerpiece
petals to hurl themselves up into this brown fugue.

As if I wouldn’t recognize a soul! If a soul
dropped into my party I’d nimbly
enough avert & dissemble, confide
I snuck in myself but moments ago to linger
likewise this very foyer, where no
hostess at all
bestirs a fragrance or lifts the lid
of a shadowed but brightening eye our way.
Surely some brillianter calendar
has jotted in over her instantly
null & palimpsest occasion just us two!

Just so
is all not lost. What a leggy old
geranium you lived to be, darling! the more
succulent than I’d guessed,
bowing, now, lips to my livid wrist,
first strains of a tune-to-be-soon
sidling our waists, twitching the circlet of fringe on my hips.

 

Biography

MARTHA ZWEIG‘s third collection, Monkey Lightning, was recently published (Tupelo Press, 2010). Her previous work includes Vinegar Bone (1999) and What Kind (2003), both published by Wesleyan University Press, as well as a chapbook, Powers (The Vermont Council on the Arts, 1976). Zweig has received a Whiting Award, Hopwood Awards, Pushcart nominations, and other honors. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Progressive, Northwest Review, Poetry, Pequod, Boston Review, The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review and Notre Dame Review.

Related

 

Printed from Cerise Press: http://www.cerisepress.com

Permalink URL: https://www.cerisepress.com/02/04/soiree-vivante