Did you never travel before?
companions ask. But you are
allowed to be clad in shyness,
even if your father stopped over
to have a woman on the side,
you may pass in innocence.
Be a conqueror's son, the scene
advises, be now put to bed
with a stranger's daughter,
and be taught that love is
not naked but barbedly eternal
and a burden like a passport.
David Cornel Dejong
OPERA COMIQUE
This flea-bag
Monte Carlo
somehow fits
an aging queen's last opera cornique
somewhere between twin comic-tragic masks
gilded in plaster on an old marquee.
The iron-meshed elevator creaks, oh,
flirt,
who once knew
men,
now bitched by chorus boys
who only want to hear about the Prince.
Sometimes I wonder what they see in me.
Yet even though they snigger when I trot
out aigrettes, now illicit, too, for laughs,
Saint Mary-the-Virgin tinkles down the street
and makes false-faces fall apart like need.
As
I did once, oh, long ago, my thoughts
sail on-stage seated on a crescent moon.
Be
gay,
Franz hisses from the wings as, trilling,
I descend that staircase in the Grand Finale
to tap my memories coyly with my fan.
Byron Vazakas
