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