Mary Dalton
"Invitation Cards"

The management
one by one stumble from their cages,
but without sound.
The soul dwindles sometimes to an ant.

Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair,
they wait the chairman’s praise and glass of water,
medals and positioned victories.
After, after—how many years?

However the sky grows dark with invitation cards,
forget the rhetoric, the trick of lying,
of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel
stretching by the river.

What was it?—I have forgotten
how to perform a funeral
now that the sun, like a lion, licks its paws.
Here, after a meagre diet of horizon, is some scenery.

Storms of flying glass,
of the pen across the page:
another eye looking through a hole,
half water.

Hurroo! Hurroo!
Law is the one
waited for history, its elbows tense,
where serpent logs lay hissing at the air.

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