OF OPERA & STENDHAL

Strange as it sounds, I really believed I knew something about the human heart, as if a few romantic comeuppances... together with a taste for opera, sufficed to give me Stendhalian credentials. – James Merrill

Is it not

strange?

We stumble

through life, each thinking

mine the lone tragedy,

this pain like none other,

none ever felt quite this way before....

thinking her heart alone

the human heart.

How young the young ...

and my own romantic comeuppances.

A girl who loved me more than

anything,

but could not cross the space

to become the woman who knew how to love

the animal I was:

In her leaving

she took that terrible absence with her

trading another absence in its place.

"...si che non trouvo attia – ma non che trasu."

Or another girl, this one

torn from the light

and I put her in the ground,

her family staring: a pale young man

broken on

a casket covered with roses

and roses

and my life blanketed by

the petals of her memory,

her touch,

the whispers

crushed by our own confusion

and her lust for speed.

"...e una commedia, lo so,

ma questa angoscia eterna pare!"

My second wife I

ran over with the old green pickup,

her ragged screams drowned in

the engine's high whine

back and forth

the wheels crushing her fine ribcage

again

and again

– but

only in my fever dreams

tossing east to west

alone

night after night

after night.

"...al alba vincera."

My younger life so operatic…

characters arranged exactly,

their exits

their entrances timed with careful

precision

to the phrasing of this or that aria

I chose to sing.

"...mi destino in la palma de mi mano

la gitana lo leyo."

But

would a wife of mine ever ride

to the funeral with my mistress

holding in their laps

between them

my severed head?

© 2011 Hakim - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: use without profit allowed only with author’s express written permission. Please don't wake up my attorney. Please.