Tragic Voyeurism
Finally tired, he would rest his eyes, upon the regal, if Long faded portrait of Goya in the niche near the washbowl Above the three stone monkeys whose solemn hands were signal, Ruminate haphazardly upon some serious and bizarre productivity, a Final Minotaur of ebullience, and hear Heifetz's Paganini skipping. Flexural, he would gush, imagining the lickerish and original fingers, Longer than ordinary, and diseased, they say, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, And perhaps larger, Marfan's, like Lincoln, another (large?) man, Regal in infirmity, truly embodying an otherness, harnessed For the purpose of the virtuoso, as well as the virtuous. Fitfully, he would turn in his bedclothes that night, Lingering over images of young walrus lost in an iceless And warming ocean, darkly, dumbly wandering far from their depths, Rummaging in bewildered emptiness, wordless and knowing under starry Fearsome blackness, and that blackness would boil in his dream, and boil. Factually, he arose at Seven A.M., and rang the maid for coffee, hoping to Linger awhile over the newspaper, and listen to the Meadolarks which Always gathered in the grand old Douglas Fir outside the window, Raised up ten or twelve inches to the let the cool night air Filter into the room's soft, if often troubled comforts.
