Girl Reading a Letter
The blues align their wavelengths: peacock, sky, The silvered blue you're wearing, ghosts of blue In the pale air, blue echoes in the eye.
What are you reading? Something so purely true, In lines so perfect and symmetrical That what has always been the case seems new?
You look up. At last, at last you know it all.
And the knowledge is perfect freedom, perfect bliss. You see sunlight itself and not where it falls.
Call your friend. You are ready for his brush, Ready to move across the centuries Bearing your message: Let the world take place.
Or does the letter say, 'Your uncle Kees Pesters the maids. They keep on giving notice. He dribbles, fouls himself, tears at his codpiece'?
You look up. The colours of incontinence Are smeared on the wall. 'My uncle needs to die.' The blues align in splendid impotence.
Laurence Lerner
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