Burlesque Acoustic

It all started with a G-chord

and a tall bottle of cherry vodka.

At the Vegas adult

community center, Evangeline

the Oyster Girl worked the walkers

and the canes with her signature

Scheherazade routine. Midwrithe,

they started to play her strings:

these sixteenth notes are raindrops,

these scattered accidentals

no accidents. One and two and three

and using your third finger,

not your pinky, here, let me

show you: pluck the nylon

B-string just as you drop the G.

Young ones know nothing about the old bump

and daily grind, says a woman

drowsy with cherry martinis, fifty years

after the facts of beauty and baring it all

have faded, and one side of the string

has died. Nocturne thinks back

that far, to the old Moulin Rouge

on 8th Street, where it once took ten men

to get the snake off her. Yeah,

she says to Sunny Dare,

I like lines like that.

Blue, Orange, Red

after Rothko

Into stiff blue scaffold sky, the starkness
of a silhouette: twilit loon, transparent
lake, and those ten thick acrylic cries.
The evening’s main liaison with death
is my mind, which gives grieving this
loon’s figure graven in air. As if you followed
life to its logical conclusion, opening
a path to the abstract where specificity
startles. And just as the basic facts
of the bigger canvasses are hard to discern,

the bird’s edgeless form blurs into blue,
into orange. Into red-framed squares of sky
defying all efforts to focus the edges
of loss. Bird dispersed, the arc of its final

flight reveals a somehow solid field
of color in my barely sketched-out scene.