By: Ron Louie
Her measured cadence, slow, articulate, and taut-lipped,
swept all of us forward with meticulous craft.
Demarking caesuras with shallow breaths,
she spoke as one might read, with that imperial
and literary accent, the remnant of a once-bright regime.
Echoes of a vanquished brash voicing,
now rasping in patrician pleasantries and platitudes,
enchanted our huddle of aspirants.
"One need not concentrate...," she would intone,
"on discovering the aching secret of life;
rather, focus only upon its gritty details;
for the truest secrets lie therein;
you may look to the balm of that vast ocean, but study
its cresting wave of debris, its intricate teeming debris."
She would pause, with a confident smile, not a smirk, beyond any
diffidence for homilies, or awkward pretensions of a phrase,
no longer annoyed with a need for uniqueness.
And she insisted upon her pleasure in gin and cigarettes,
even after the chest pains, the wheezes,
the anxious refrains, when her lips then surrendered
their purest azure hues, like the warm effusive waters,
upon which she loved to dwell, aboard the civil yachts,
running free of the shoals in the sun,
erratic, hot rushes of breeze
billowing their spinnakers to sea.
Ron Louie lives in Seattle. His poems have appeared in Antiphon, Neurology, JAMA and Medical Humanities. He has two blogs: CareGivingOldGuy.website and AlzheimerGadfly.net
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