As Bush finds backs to pat and hands to
shake,
The Democrats can't seem to buy a break.
The
opposition doesn't coalesce,
Because the spotlight's on the
Clinton mess,
A mess that's just like catnip to the
press.
Afraid that he will never go away,
The Democrats by
now just want to say,
Avoid the headlines, can't
you, Bill?
Speak softly, please, not louder.
Eschew the
networks, can't you, Bill?
Enough, man! Take a
powder!
Ignored as long as he is on the
stage,
The Democrats, befuddled, try to gauge
How he, amidst
the sleaze, seems so unfazed
While they are crazed, and find
themselve amazed
At all the oxygen the man
inhales,
As he on his sword himself
impales.
Avoid the headlines, can't you,
Bill?
They say. At any cost!
Eschew the networks, can't you,
Bill?
Could you please just get lost?
A box of Chopin nocturnes handed down
from the other side of my mother's death--
evening gowns in trash bags making a little
Golgotha of their own right in the corner
of that studio we had spent all morning
emptying out--uncandled cold chaperoned
through the sill. Lullabies all of us had
already heard while drinks kept going round
the parlor after her wake assembled now
into makeshift history--bits of tenderness
discarded down the cosmos slide, each night
a phantom limb, the hours trapezing over
that sea of anonymous faces where sidereal
glances scale up the piano's mirrored lid.