Verses in the Form of a Starry Night

Could be paradise is a moment not

a place, a moment like a monument

that you can return to in all weathers

and see pigeons. Our grand occasions stand up   

so well to gales they seem outside of time

yet not one will be there unless you are. 

Hellish moments too are durable, shameless,

nasty statues.  Each instant is intimately joined

to the one before and the one after,

a trio of paper dolls among the millions;

only the ecstatic and disgraceful

detach themselves and soar, turn into

dark planets, bright constellations.  To summon

the exquisite we must exert ourselves, to

banish the vile apply equal and

opposite force.  It's depressing to think how 

often the foul's recalled, the fair forgotten. 

Should I confide to you my favorite paradise

you'd blush, then that moment too would detach

itself from my telling and your chiding

to become another paradise, stone

statue with a fountain, matchless paper doll,

newfound planet, a constellation to

which I could assign your luminous name.

Robert Wexelblatt is professor of humanities at Boston University's College of General Studies.  He has published essays, stories, and poems in a wide variety of journals, two story collections, Life in the Temperate Zone and The Decline of Our Neighborhood, a book of essays, Professors at Play; his novel, Zublinka Among Women, won the Indie Book Awards First Prize for Fiction.  His most recent book is a short novel, Losses.