“Sometimes, though, the cracked plate has to be retained in the pantry, has to be kept in service as a household necessity. It can never again be warmed on the stove nor shuffled with the other plates in the dishpan; it will not be brought out for company, but it will do to hold crackers late at night or to go into the ice-box under the left-overs.”—Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” (1936)
By necessity,
the cracked plate serving a role–
last night’s leftovers.
“Now once more the belt is tight and we summon the proper expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth. Sometimes, though, there is a ghostly rumble among the drums, an asthmatic whisper in the trombones that swings me back into the early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better, and there was a first abortive shortening of the skirts, and girls all looked alike in sweater dresses, and people you didn’t want to know said ‘yes, we have no bananas,’ and it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were—and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.” —Scott Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1931)
You could say
that we, the glistening sap,
resin and seedlings
branched out
from Jazz Age lore
got bamboozled
by slide trombones,
silk flowers
and gin-soaked kimonos,
but really
we blame it on the hours
spent with the moon,
who, in her intoxicating
kamikaze mixing with romantic youth
stripped us of our hinges
while tipping us over gilded edges,
and later, much later,
looking back at our undisclosed remains,
we smiled, grew misty-eyed, felt shame,
and held secret funerals
for our faded lives,
while also holding our mortal deficits
close to our hearts,
where, the wistful mercy of afterglow
flickered off
and on
off
and on.
By the light of the autumn moon,
she became, as always, a legend
true to her own scythe and reaping.
There’s something funny,
and a little lonely,
about being the idiot
protagonist
in the tales
you endlessly
narrate to yourself,
as if you were
somehow plagiarizing the stars
to round out your silence
with immaterial gains
amounting to destiny,
if only in name
and furious fount.
It is an emptying-out,
a daily maintenance
of purge
which, in its favored form,
testifies
to the lore of secrets
held within revelations,
or,
delineates just cause
for an arsonist’s burning.
Between true lovers,
a throbbing flight of totems,
carved from moon and ash.
I close my notebook,
and everything that goes with it,
and listen to the crow
cawing outside my window.
I get confused.
Is he saying
Winter is coming soon,
or,
It’s time to dream rightly,
as I do,
with zero regard for time zones
or distance.
I wait for the crow to say more.
Nothing. Silence.
I open my notebook
and jot down
my happy misunderstandings
between lines
without measure.
In the small hours,
and secret world,
where nocturnal flowers
call for tenderest glances
and esteem,
blooming
occurs at the inevitable pace
of dreams,
and swooning resolve.
Victory
is the epilogue to squabble.
And its prelude too.
That is, when your bayonet
plunges into the ribcage
or spleen of another
version of you,
the moon weeps
slow silver rivers
of tears,
unconsoled by the glitteringly
indifferent stars,
same as the wanton humans
who have gravely lost touch
with the moon’s most sensitive
feedback.
John Biscello 