Member Poem

by Bruce Boston and Alessandro Manzetti

Summer.
The apartment is dark.
A small circle of light
runs up the ivory wallpaper,
penetrates a fissure
of the Boulle furniture,
awakens the woodworms,
asleep in their gnawed galleries.
This alien sun is the torch
of the thief Jean-Paul.

He is doing his job,
the only job he knows,
sweating and cursing,
followed by a train of moths
that appeared from nowhere,
drawn by the light.
"Damned beasts!"

Jean-Paul hears a noise.
Something is moving
in the next room.
The cocaine in his veins
melds with an adrenaline rush.
He releases the safety
on his revolver.
"Bloody hell."

The light of the torch enters
the room and is drawn
to the ornate chandelier,
its crystals crashing into pieces
before Jean-Paul’s stoned eyes,
a thousand slanting rays.

His vision clicks
like a lantern show
of dislocated time
from one image to the next.

He sees himself climbing
the rickety fire escape,
sees himself as if
he were a being floating
in the air beyond.

Sees himself
prying the window open
and climbing awkwardly
into the room.

Sees himself as a patient
etherized upon a table,
the worn and worried eyes
of half-masked faces
looming above him.

Jean-Paul shakes his
head and looks down,
blinking from the reflections.
There is no one here:
no men, ghosts or cops.

A blue-skinned painting,
a stormy sea in the manner of Turner,
shifts inexplicably back and forth,
rubbing against one wall.
"Here’s the noise. Son of a bitch!"
There is no danger, perhaps.

The moths multiply,
continue to fly in a circle
around the head of the thief,
as if he were the only lighthouse
in thousands of miles of darkness.

Jean-Paul takes off his cap
and swipes them away.
“It's hot in here, too damn hot!”

Yet all at once his skin feels refreshed.
The tongue of a subtle wind
is licking his cheeks and forehead,
even though the windows are shut.

The sails of the Turner ship
billow and swell to bursting,
and Jean-Paul can hear
the shouts of the sailors,
curses and cries of despair
swallowed by the storm.
He can smell the brine
of the crashing waves.

He is enveloped by a vision
of his mother and father,
his older brother,
all dead and buried,
riding the wings of that storm,
arms outstretched, legs straight,
their faces drawn back,
as if they had been
crucified upon the wind.

The thief begins
to distrust his mind,
the stuff that he bought
in the parking lot
before going to work.

That dealer, Josh,
strange guy,
looked more like an insect
than a human being,
scrawny, with those thin ears
laid back against his skull,
his arms held out
and bent at the elbows
like some praying mantis,
and dark impenetrable eyes,
just like the eyes
of those damned moths
now covering Jean-Paul
in a fluttering coat
like a second skin.

He drops the torch
and it flickers into darkness.
Like the moths, he is
now drawn to the only
visible light in the room,
the lamppost beyond the
window in the street below.

The moths begin batting
against the window
and Jean-Paul has
become one of them,
batting against the window,
trying to get to the light.

The glass shatters outward
in a starburst rush
and he is flying
like a magical being,
his features taut,
his hair blown back,
until he sees the asphalt
rushing up to greet him.

Deep in his coma,
Jean-Paul dreams he is a moth,
dreams he is a thief who can fly,
dreams of a thousand unlocked doors
and open windows.

“Bloody hell.”