Lunar Follies

SEA OF SERENITY

In the haze, there can be discerned, perhaps, a dark grave, an Italian sea, an ideal copy of the lyre of Orpheus, and an arbor of formidable vines among whose bilious green rests a solitary rose of sorrow. Alas! the head they all adore aches still with the kiss of the enormous queen, and what a lariat-spinner she can sardonically be. And there she stands, or, actually, emerges, emerges steadily and slowly from a crepuscular violet and lavender that informs the entire room! There glows, as well, the golden hair that is popular with every true son of Greece, an odd collection of rogues, of course, many of them actually Italian, covered, most usually, with ashes like unto grime on a smeared window, through which most travelers cannot see the horizon. Just as well, since it was never intended that they see anything at all. What a blague! What a jape! A pale-pink hydrangea complements the daguerrotypes of the azure sea, although “azure” is a word that creative-writing cliques insist should never be used in, well, creative writing. And we are well aware of what that is! As something more than mere decoration, assemblage doyens and their faithful docents claim that a flame-colored scarf is central to just about everything; as are, too, the Lord of the Volcano, three green glass eyes, peace be upon them, two Frostian spondees, dragons’ teeth (as usual), and a certain implacable scarlet. None of these earthy, sublunary things can manage (despite their changing dispositions within the space of this really beautiful, if somewhat fruity, fake Louis xvi apartment, complete with upholstered jakes) to derange the pure given whole, the serene quiver of Sacred Art, which is always as astonishing and inevitable, but not really, not really at all, as a song by the sublime Harry Warren, e.g., “At Last” or “I Only Have Eyes for You.”