Based on Joseph Christian Leyendecker’s painting ’The Violinist and His Assistant’.

Moonlight on 7th

Who could imagine a tree 

singing of heaven 

in an uprooted forest

or the Actaeon of ambition 

daring to quench his thirst 

with a sonata

that waltzes on glass?

 

Here

stir the sonnets of broken bars

and the metronomed soles

downing the beats  

they call 

ichor. 

 

Tossing peanuts into caps, 

a sleight of hand sprouts diamonds from the waterlogged wells

and in a misguided hope,

spares a penny for good luck.

 

In a city that’s forgotten its core,

what’s to make of the hollow, 

in which the hair of Pegasus still sounds?

 

Grazing the grounds,

the stag strings his bow with a quivering arrow.

His marrow?

The moonlight.

-Amy Struthers