Divyasri Krishnan

Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz

after Wallace Stevens

Even the cello, whose note is used
to lingering, has packed up. Is gone.
A symphony in New York is not
the same as a symphony in Pittsburgh,
I tell you, the music is all wrong.
It is like traveling a long way
to watch a death. See how the velvet
is ripped out, replaced by wood—
The chandeliers bearing their white fruit,
The stairs leading to nowhere
but beauty, so everywhere.
Even the mirrors they have taken,
an unforgivable crime, or else
they have taken my eyes.
So gone are the modes of desire.
No more music and no sight.
It was in the mirrors where I learned
to love you as a girl, reassured
by your figure in the silver,
a line of heat at my back.
O, second heart. I never looked back.
Now, the memory of your breath in my ear
its own movement—
Orpheus loved as a woman.
Who else could understand
the plucked string of fear, its eternal thrum?

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Divyasri Krishnan is the author of Primordial Knowledge (Bottlecap Press). Her work is published in DIAGRAM, Muzzle Magazine and elsewhere. Her work has further been recognized by the Best of the Net, Kenyon Review Writers Workshops, Periplus Collective and Palette Poetry. She studies at Carnegie Mellon University.