To Wilde

 

They piss on your grave,

these anti-aesthetes, for whom beauty is found

in glorifying the harsh and jar jangling angled

wastelands, small i overdone,

like dodo eggs in Alighierian imaginings.

 

You would pat their heads,

poor pretentious fools, and send them back to school

to learn that a nymph is not simply a stroke of a pen,

but a well – she will tell a thousand dreams

to Scheherezade, whom they would suffocate.

 

In Pere Lachaise, you are languid,

as Morrison gathers frogs to his bosom, lizards

having long since shed their skin, singing scales

against Chopin’s Polonaise or Amazing Grace

with equal facility, in disregard for the breathless.

 

You keep fine company,

but your bones are not your own, they have long gone –

rejecting the prosaic earth, they calcified the air, where

sunlight hid in waterfalls of thought and Thalia

sought to flambé sombre soldiers in their own affected arts.

 

In the corner of a promise

you stow your reflection; shadows spring fully suckled

to virgin pages.  Shattered tablets lie forbidding in closed chambers,

beneath the sleeping Endymion; bring us Arcady, where beauty

is untrodden.  Bring us clowns, whose hearts may not be broken.