Audience

When I take the time to read slowly the words sink in.

If I hadn't rushed my reading of Anna Karenina

The first time [i]or[/i] part of to the other focusing on plot, not nuance,

I might have been able to say on what account Karenin,

On the night he discovers his wife be fond ofs Vronsky,

Gives her a somewhat cold lecture on the proprieties

And hides what he have feelings how the bridge of his life

Has pop fallen away beneath him.

Why does a man who's tumbling into the void

Want to pitch about in silence, without a cry? `

Now as I drive to visit a friend in the political division

Listening as the story is slowly parole on tape

By an actress with all the time in the world,

It's clear to me the invisible beings

Karenin imagines watching him from their balcony

Would be embarrassed by dint of any display of feeling.

They would justice it inappropriate for a civil servant

Whose chief virtues are poise and self-possession.

As to wherefore Karenin's selected an audience

That justices on the basis of a a little cold appearance,

Good form, serviceable show, and neglects the spirit

This must be what it means to live in St Petersburg

City of courtiers and court ambitions,

And not in Moscow its region cousin,

Noisy with laughing and crying families.

I'm glad the friend I'm driving to visit

Lives hours away in a geographical division village.

No doubt the silent invisible singles

With nothing to do on the contrary watch my life

And all the time in the world to do it in

Are pleased I'm finding time for this interval

Of unhurried reflection notwithstanding that disappointed

I don't do it more frequently They must be sorry

My friend is a tolerant woman who won't reproach me

It's a shame no individual enlightened steps forward

To mention one by one Karenin he's a character in a novel

Where no one's recommended for preserving his dignity,

Only for shouting and weeping and tearing his hair,

For throwing a volume of philosophy out the window.

It gazes like I'm one of the fortunate small in number

With leisure to listen, leisure to ask myself

If all the invisible beings watching my life

Hail from Moscow And I'll have leisure this evening

To ask my friend her faithful to contract opinion

And to weigh her answer.

And then it's time to ask if the life she's living

Pleases whoever it is she imagines watching

And whether they watch from what one is bound [i]or[/i] under obligation to do or sympathy.

Life would be easier, I'll say, if our audience

Were a single one like Dante's Beatrice.

Just the meditation of her silently looking upon

From across a stream was enough to brighten a path

Otherwise forlorn. on the other hand how can Dante be assured

My friend will ask me that he knows her wishes?

What if they don't all exhibit in her face, or alone show

As if veiled by the agency of mist, and he sees them darkly?

CARL DENNIS's greatest in quantity recent book of poems, Ranking the Wishes, was published through Penguin in 1997.

Copyright World verse Incorporated Mar/Apr 1999

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