“The Asterisk Is for the Dead”

If you want to know the truth vs. if you need

To know the truth—when you can’t help feeling

Couth rather than un- or ruth rather than -less,

Or when the index of your life under L is

Lighthouse, to the, but the page numbers are

Missing or have been replaced by asterisks,

Although you would be lucky (how many lucky

Stars can be counted correctly) to be thrown

In the pile with people like Roger Maris, but

Not necessarily Babe Ruth, but the subject

Is a tetchy one, fit for a barroom, that night

You walked in and saw speech balloons

Everywhere, and when you thought, I ain’t

Mispronouncing schadenfreude again, shame,

Shampoo, cockapoo, Coachella Valley, shilly-

Shally, the shell covering the seed, when the world

Fell apart like a line break, 17-something, 18-

Something, 19-something, 20-something, 21-

Something, the symphony took a shellacking on

The 78, which notes were disintegrating and which

Were simply heard, the way the paper squeaked

In the paper cutter, grade school classroom circa

1959, feeling tête-bêche, one big hiatus from here

To there, a schism in the way schism is said, like reality,

Naïve, or Egon Schiele, dead at 28, Spanish Flu pandemic,

Knave, crème brûlée, Tet Offensive, lockjaw, and it was

Only in between coughing fits that you could look up

And really see the stars for what they really seemed to be.

Notes:

The title is a line from poem 1685, “Of Glory not a Beam is left,” from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.W. Franklin.

Source: Poetry (November 2020)