Though the society he sought did not exist here,
no coteries of fine talk or drawing rooms
where the posturings of the privileged could be skewered,
he nevertheless took pleasure in the Victorian B&B’s,
and the old, grand mansions that lined the shore.
Now in a rocker on the balcony of one of them,
the many-dormered Angel by the Sea,
he pondered the ghastliness that all immortals
were unable to die-days like this, years,
in which landscape and one’s mind never changed.
Yet he’d always be the central consciousness
of wherever he was, and he trusted, inevitably,
that there’d be some Daisy or Isabel
with whom to dine, then to send out into
the common vagaries of the Cape May night.
The author as pimp, in it to plumb a discrepancy,
to watch, perhaps, one of his ladies
sit down at the wrong table, attempt to speak French
to a bunch of ruffians, say, from Rahway,
or perhaps mistake a mistress for a wife.
He’d be content to have observed for us a small
human tendency, one of the laws of the heart.
Then, for him, a Courvoisier, a good night’s rest,
and a sentence that wouldn’t stop, modifier
after modifier, turns, hesitations, refinements.
But was he worrying now that someone who thought
and couldn’t stop thinking may never have loved?
And were we who watched him there watching us
so unfair, so spoiled, to regret that one who gave us
something had also not given us something else?
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