Raphael Rubinstein: In the meantime

Security men were opening limousine doors for diplomats in transit,

someone was reading a page of weak writing

or seeing Pierrot Le Fou for the fifth time,

skin stretched across a young ribcage

warmed to the touch of uncertain fingertips...

or whatever we might later agree to call them

massed in the plaza with placards and banners.

Above them the moon rose, over the official dome,

reminding three or four of some wholly incidental occasion

that, for no even guessable-at reason had been

carried over through successive eras

like the sum of a previous equation.

Each of those so afflicted had a different image

with which to contend.

For one, bric-a-brac in a shop window

a February evening eight years previous;

for another, a bartender telling a joke in a

long defunct nightclub.

It seems, to change the subject, sort of, that we have to

spend a lot of time thinking

about those who practice the same profession as ourselves,

how some are better than we at it, so much better

it hardly seems possible

that our diplomas read the same, and then those sinister

figures, always distant

but active, like crows on the plains at sunset, who botch

every operation and yet are allowed to bungle on

for decades,

as if, somehow, incredibly, no one had noticed or,

worse, had noticed and, gruesomely, approved.

Hunched late over a desk, or on the porch swing not

following the lyrics of your latest companion,

in the background the radio reporting an

incident-free state visit,

your hand moves towards the lurid cover of

a mystery with extra pages.

Raphael Rubinstein's first collection, The Basement of the Cafe Rilke, is forthcoming from Hard Press. His poems have appeared in recent issues of Oblek, Talisman, and Lingo. He lives in New York City and works as an art critic and magazine editor.

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Jul 1995
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