Tis Late

Tis Late 

by April Bernard

 

Of course the tall stringy woman

draped in a crocheted string-shawl 

 

selling single red carnations

 

coned in newsprint the ones

 

she got at the cemetery

 

and resells with a god bless you

 

for a dollar that same woman 

 

who thirty years ago

 

was a graduate student

 

in playwriting who can and will

 

recite "At the round earth's

 

imagined corners, blow--"

 

announces silently amidst her louder

 

announcements that the experiment

 

some amateurs mixed of

 

white fizzing democracy

 

with smoky purple capitalism

 

has failed. We already knew that.

 

Her madness is my madness

 

and this is my flower in a cone

 

of waste paper I stole from

 

someone's more authentic grief

 

but I will not bless you

 

as I have no spirit of commerce

 

and no returning customers

 

and do not as so many must

 

actually beg for my bread. It is another

 

accident of the lab explosion

 

that while most died and others lost legs

 

some of us are only vaguely queasy

 

at least for now 

 

and of course mad conveniently mad

 

necessarily mad because 

 

"tis late to ask for pardon" and

 

we were so carefully schooled 

 

in false hope schooled

 

like the parrot who crooks her tongue

 

like a dirty finger

 

repeating what her flat bright eyes deny.