I returned to the imperfect city to retire
the myths I mistook for love.
Coins glinted in imperial fountains.
Flowers awaited a protagonist’s hand.
Like Stravinsky in summer, I heard
my name everywhere: traffic,
train cars, schoolchildren playing—
Who could possibly know me?
Walking the streets (which were my streets),
I was Venus in mortal dress.
The headlights wept. The twilit sky
sprawled like a book, bleed, or dream.
The city was mine. Like a God denying
a heretic, I denied my part and left it.
That night, I was alone at the opera
where the poor girl labors, again, to make
the mad boy take her. For the first time,
it was the music that I loved best.
David Ehmcke lives in New York. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, bethh, Columbia, Epoch, Grain, Gulf Stream, Hopkins Review, Meridian, Notre Dame Review, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of History of Lyric (Quarterly West).
Image: Carson Masterson. Unsplash, 2018.
