Incendiary Lawyer

Her friends---

            perhaps they are her friends---

sodden stoics in the dark gray norm,

insisted that she sign,

            sign on the thick black line,

that she would not

            for one full day

she would not shrug

            the ache she has become

into the handsome antique robes

            black with the authority,

            with the legitimacy of her life.

 She would not, she promised,

            unearth the crimson gas can

            in the garage chaotic with the

            sixteen boxes of her divorce,

            made of trees and breathing,

            back when she mouthed her vows,

now mere punctuation, black

            on the bleached square leaves,

reams of a once life.

 She would not, she promised,

beg, borrow, or buy with

the last of the grocery money

the biggest, blackest felt pen

capable of etching truth

and shattering indictments

on secondhand cardboard.

 No, no, not, she promised,

would she stride to the station

with the kid’s allowance

and jab in the nozzle

for three dollars of gas,

its fragrance harking back

to hospitals for broken cars

where she sorrowed over

vehicles outlived

in the sagas of love journeys.

 She thinks she promised

to forget the matches

in case of one more pilgrimage

to the house of law and logic,

just in case she hungered

for the blind lap of Themis

(bitch goddess of proofs,

graciously aping out justice),

the gas can banging on one side,

attache banging the other,

hiding under skirts, her gown, her robe, her calling,

her naked legs begging

let these bruises be the last

thing she ever foresaw.

 Certainly she promised

quiescence for one day:

no sparks or scrapes or ratios or even

the rough panting efforts of Prometheus

to draw fire or a picture

that would capture all of hell;

no creation, preservation or

the magic of a match

touching the sweet scent of her,

running on empty and reeking

of gas, the ghastly, ghostly past,

torching the ice-bound court

never before

lit by the Word.

No, her friends made her sign it away,

forswear the heat ached for so long,

shut away death and his parting gifts

just for one day,

just till a plane

painted with blooms and

bound for a truth-telling sun

might deign to lift her,

a cough of spent smoke,

a tatter of carbon,

away.  

MADAME JUSTICE ARACHNE ON THE BENCH

Her suspended steps to truth:
       deity,
             then duty:
       color
             and then sound;
such tentative rulings,
the weft but slowly to be guessed:
             m'Lady Weaver,
                   which direction now?

       now vision,
             and then voice;
       beauty,
             and then last
             the warp of memory

so she teases up the web,
       the nap of my reality,
       the fabric of a lighted life
             shadowing its
                               self


THEMIS

Blindness has its virtue
in its veiled suggestions
of make-believe light
laying pearled curves against
the little black dress of the world
       an infinity of chic

wearing black it is so easy to be fat
and slither past the ambush
of politically correct
nuance in the corner of the glass
      
       and personally
       she would rather fumble
as since clumsy childhood
through a bar-world legible
mostly to wet canine noses

       and personally
       she would rather have
the dark furry snugglings
with her familiar
             deep
in the planetary night

       personally
             she would have foregone
this shabby enlightenment
the exposure to
             a fraudulent sun

Eva van Loon  mettalaw@aol.com