michael r.   Burch

	Of Civilization and Disenchantment Suddenly uncomfortable to stay at my grandfather's house— actually his third new wife's, in her daughter's bedroom —one interminable summer with nothing to do, all the meals served cold, even beans and peas . . . Lacking the words to describe ah!, those pearl-luminous estuaries— strange omens, incoherent nights. Seeing the flares of the river barges illuminating Memphis, city of bluffs and dying splendors. Drifting toward Alexandria, Pharos, Rhakotis, Djoser's fertile delta, lands at the beginning of a new time and "civilization." Leaving behind sixty miles of unbroken cemetery, Alexander's corpse floating seaward, bobbing, milkwhite, in a jar of honey. Memphis shall be waste and desolate, without an inhabitant. Or so the people dreamed, in chains.                         Nashville and Andromeda I have come to sit and think in the darkness once again. It is three a.m.; outside, the world sleeps . . . How nakedly now and unadorned the surrounding hills expose themselves to the lithographies of the detached moonlight— breasts daubed by the lanterns of the ornamental barns, firs ruffled like silks casually discarded. They lounge now— indolent, languid, spread-eagled— their wantonness a thing to admire, like a lover's ease idly tracing flesh. They do not know haste, lust, virtue, or any of the sanctimonious ecstasies of men, yet they please, if only in the solemn meditations of their loveliness of the erect pen. Perhaps there upon the surrounding hills, another forsakes sleep for the hour of introspection, gabled in loneliness, swathed in the pale light of Andromeda. Seeing. Yes, seeing, but always unfeeling, unknowing anything of the affairs of men.   Resignation and Resolution             —Lines written at the close of the 20th century. Take me home. The party is over, the century passed – no time for a lover. And my heart grew heavy as the fireworks hissed through the dark over Central Park, past high-towering spires to some backwoods levee, hurtling banner-hung docks to the torchlit seas. And my heart grew heavy; I felt its disease— its apathy, wanting the bright, rhapsodic display to last more than a single day. If decay was its rite, now it has learned to long for something with more intensity, more gaudy passion, more song— like the huddled gay masses, the wildly-cheering throng. You ask me— How can this be? A little more flair, or perhaps only a little more clarity. I leave her tonight to the century's wake; she disappoints me.

	Michael R. Burch has been published over 450 times in American, English, Scottish, Canadian, Australian, South African and Indian journals, among them The Chariton Review, Light Quarterly, Poet Lore, The Lyric, Verse, Unlikely Stories, Writer's Digest – The Year's Best Writing, The Best of the Eclectic Muse 1989-2003 and ByLine.