1. Megan loved the movies.
Feared past, at thirty-three,
the moment of plucked
from obscurity discovery,
Dame Fortune finally folded
the coverlet back. A prostitute
of golden sacrifice and secret grace,
a watershed catchment for battered
ambition. Worn shopgirl--
requirements of pink powder,
perfumed scarves, mauled lipstick
the retail waged anointing of
wrinkle cream and toes so soft--
showgirl dreams entangled
in scented hair, a phone call
to mother the only evidence
of promise as late for the casting
couch, the call, she blow
dried her tresses in the tub.
2. Daisy, dried from disuse,
bought kitchen appliances
with frightening frequency
as her forty-eighth birthday
flashed searing hot,
a magnesium scalpel.
"Did you miss the rain?" she asks
her apartment's swarthy underground
garageman, while exiting
to shop for a Target toaster.
"It was on the news."
The treelined stretch of Route 202,
how to assuage the derailment
of genetic destiny, how to unknot
the desiccated kernels of possibility,
when time has repossessed
its Mixmaster lottery of the body?
Daisy adjusts her hairpiece
in the rearview. A child
appearance, warped in the
corner of her cornea, into
the road with Freon eyes. Heart-
leap veer, a rugged minivan.
3. Brenda was a beauty.
Her long, twenty-four-year-old
legs had a lightly sunkissed sheen,
which she buffed and polished
while the dust on her coffee table
was defiantly constant, motes tumbling
down through her studio's sunbeams
to gather around her refrigerator's
buzzing electrical coils
like a beard of bees.
The following footsteps started
in December, on lunch at the deli
under a Manhattan money hive
of dissected and teetering balances.
The invisible clattering haunted
and described her routine, her late hours,
her blithe shortcut through a darkened alley,
dazzle blinded by distant streetlamps.
Her legs a intricate fluttering of moth's wings,
a cricket's rubbed eek of vibrato,
fly legs' urgent, hungry crisscrossing,
they would smell of dewy meadows at dawn.
He revealed the desperate accountant
she'd suspected. In the darkness he
was as formless as empathy. Brenda pivots
to stride, discovers his infesting friends
intent on the primal purpose of pheromones.
4. Frederica craved the wind.
Sixteen, she remembers her mother,
but has forgotten her face and name.
She wishes wild rocs to clutch
her in their talons, flapping her straining
from the ground, dangling
her wretchedness in effigy.
The night breeze disregards quiet, demands
a blot, seeping into ruts and rivulets as
she whistled upon the hole in the flute
with fluttering fingertips and pursed lips.
Freddie stifled thick coughs to keep
from being noticed, and yet
bristles at sidelong regards,
tugging at the chafing tethers
to the torment of the actual.
The voice of whispered insinuations
caresses her ear in a hiss of unworthiness,
picking at the endless imperfections
of being encased in flesh.
A firm draft whisks her to the ledge,
earthbound cars blaring far below.
The wind overlooked or neglects
to carry her plummet to the bottom.
5. Lauren carved glass. At eighty-one,
her breathing is harsh, shattered,
slicing trachea, bronchioles, each alveolus,
with a lifespan of sharp fused sand
and obsessive dedication
settled resident in her lungs.
But the patterns her instruments
traced in the molten molecules--
refracting light in a fine, subtle bevel,
supplying shadows to circumscribe shape,
etching illustrations in the prismatic ether--
shimmer, earnestly coherent in her memory
with a childlike delight in rainbows.
The hospital sheets are crisp
on her dissipating, translucent skin.
After years of repetitive, constant effort
she feels time's allowance to embrace
the authority of ease,
industry's simple, common, only
reward for work well done.
Lauren fumble slides oxygen mask off,
refusing to beep out final gasp
into plastic.
Warped, rippling with pain,
she exhales glittering hard gems
into the welcoming air.
Taliesin
At night magic
is most often abroad. Listen
for the glimmering source
of feeble rushlights while above
the ordered patterns wheel silently.
The moon herself rests
upon the tangled branches of the trees--
stout vows, arguments, sighs, and threats:
oak, wailing when cut;
hawthorn, fairy dominion;
Northerners say ash holds up the sky;
and always, a willow, shuffling to grab travelers
to encase within a dense trunk.
The name of the old man has been rendered
unimportant in this story.
His eyes are a boy
on a winnowing floor,
surrounded by similarity.
A moment all is still
the name spoken under the sun when words
float cheap thistledown in a daybeam--
with only distant echoes
of the power they once possessed.
Lasting perhaps only a night, words gave
shape. Knowing the name of a thing
was essence perception,
therefore a moment's mastery.
Name the thing of absence--
a summons of being,
encased alive in words.
"I am a musician, an artificer like the wren.
I was many things before I was released,
I was a word in letters."
This night sings, faint in falling mists.
The ground dampens thick with wet
under a canopy of redwoods.
Before the sun rises with bursting light,
listen:
Gene Hult is the author of more than 50 published novels, novelizations, non-fiction titles, and novelty books for children and young adults. He lives in the SoHo neighborhood of New York with his good, fat cat named Gladys and his evil cat named Mabel, who is getting fatter.