How else could he know what I know?
- Maya Angelou
You windowshop for a one-way ticket to immortality
as the bell opens Round Seven
to a color field measuring eight-feet-by-six-feet . . .
footnoting the 600 square feet Rothko reneged on
while Vivaldi's Four Seasons follows
the two-point-five mil as it disappears
into someone's backstory
demonstrating for arts majors the phenomenon
of the Rothkovian blur . . . Lady Macbeth's
Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts,
unsex me here . . .
Enter, stage left, Somnambulist 1:
I jaywalk out of a lobotomy . . . I mean, c'mon . . .
with lines like this? . . . Soliloquize me! . . .
A woman wrote Shakespeare? . . .
But didn't we already know that? . . .
Perhaps the archives bubble with happenstance
and Little Miss Whatsherface shadows the Bard's ghost . . .
This too will be stuffed into a time capsule
as soon as . . . Enter, Somnambulist 2:
I texted "Taming of the Shrew" Katherine
who blurted "My tongue will tell the anger of my heart . . ."
The boxed set wins, yes? . . . especially
in those moments of fine-tooth combing . . .
the beach at best . . . the least we could hope for
in dawn's early flubbed lines . . .
Whoa! . . . here's Somnambulist 3
with Othello's Emilia: Let husbands know /
Their wives have sense like them.
You trace the circumference of the argument
centuries later bolstered by hard-core gas canisters
spewing death . . . the exits sealed . . .
the moments lapsing into forevermore . . .
The bell ending the round? . . . Of course we knew . . .
