The room to the left
Is the one
She stayed in
Although I myself
Have no preferences.

Give me sunlight dancing on the waves
Or the other view
The distant mountaintops
Whose snow glistens
In the dawning from
A hundred miles away.

Her room is done in
Pearl, I see, and her view
Is of the city. Well
She always said her
Fate was twisted up in
The stage and screen and
That if I wanted to see her
Again, it would be in a Playbill.

So I sat on the aisle while she struggled
With Lerner and Loewe, then fled town
Before the zombies could write their venom
While sipping cosmopolitans at Sardi’s.

And it is said New York is so much
The better without her being ‘round
But that is all relative to me:
Not everyone has to sing and play
An instrument to make it there.

And it took me so long to find out
She had for a time become a waitress
And then some assistant to a craven
Whose lust for her extended
To a careless platitude that her typing skills
Were more than adequate.

I don’t know how she left the troll
But think maybe her fleeting acting skills
Gave her one last burst to conspire
A grand exit, quiet as the night.

And you say this was her room
And she could hear the waves crashing
On the rocks across that highway

And that she brought a camera
So she could capture it, and that she
Went down to the sea in slippers
Knowing they might not survive
The storm.

I’d go there myself, but
I do not want to be the one
Who finds a wet and strangled scarf
Among the kelp lolling in the froth

I think if she had just gone to summer stock
She could have polished herself
A little and made fools of her
Detractors. As it is, her room leaves
Little to the imagination except the
Thought she left it way too soon.

11/30/2012

Posted on 11/30/2012
Copyright © 2025 Ken Harnisch