On Duration

From James Hoch, who is featured on Poetry Daily today:

Wedding Piñata


In the rented performance space
the devil’s head is rigged with a hanger
inverted into a question mark
under which a ring of children
crouch poised for the gathering
while the wedding party wolfs down
miniature pigs-in-blankets, duck
with Thai peppers, curried goat
steaming in milk, just as the Buddha-
headed best man leather-clad, bull-
pierced swings the sawed-off hockey
stick as if carving calligraphy from air,
then the bride’s father and his scotch
wielding like a terribly old knight
nearly decapitates his wife of forty years,
catching her sequined beret, her silver
wig shimmering like a mackerel
in the flickering strobe as we take turns
tying the red bandana over our eyes,
ready to receive instruction or cigarette.
Times like this, one prays there is life
on other planets, that someday cruising
in their space jalopies they’ll sputter
and stall and see with their one good eye
what we all see here on the purgatory
of the dance floor—our mirrored ball,
our ruin of disco—vexed in the couple
swaying, saying soft things, waiting
for one lucky fool to hack and flay
some hidden pleasure, some sweet rain.


*I truly admire the ability to carry a sentence well past its grammatical threshold (no wedding pun intended), so today---as I file for graduation with a May walk and an August diploma and ask myself: Self, where do you see us in five years?, I say I have no idea and for now, I'm still taking notes on all things, for now, I'm trying to get to twenty lines with no period and very few commas (definitely not a semi-colon but maybe a colon), and I'm trying to hold John Lennon close as he loops in my head because I know that my life is happening while I'm writing letters for PhDs and professorships and lectureships and fellowships, and I have a lot of ambition to get off the merry-go-round, to just let it go.

*****