Reflection

Like people in an Egon Schiele
the couple in the café window
pose. Cigarettes are accessories
after the fact of murdered hours. Hands
almost too heavy to lift just nudge
them up to one more acrid midnight.
Why, in any sense, go on? Why not
drop it in the Kloveniersburgwal,
sink beneath worms of smoked gold, white light
fragments, broken letters, gable ends.

Leona Medlin, Amsterdam, December 1991, January 1992