Down There

were more surprises than she had anticipated.

Her second husband was generous

beyond anything she had ever experienced.

Heaped with gifts,

provided daily with entertainment

that filled her with delight,

it was a totality of pleasure without the consequences.

And his suggestion for her to advance her education,

and, perhaps, to even share in governmental responsibilities,

provided her with a world-widening awareness that she had not previously imagined.

 

Best of all she no longer had to listen

to those dreary songs

which made stones weep,

and cows bellow forlornly at the moon.

From the very beginning it had been apparent

that her genetic make-up did not take kindly

to those depressive tonalities which characterized his compositions.

They had all the traits and innuendos of a life-style

which her youth and disposition instinctively rejected.

It made her angry to realize that she had been intellectually repressed.

 

Now this was the Life, a second one

to be sure, but more real than that which had come before.

And, though it was also a fact

that this fellow had another wife waiting in the wings,

she found that she had had enough of possessiveness,

an evolving quality, the progression of which,

from virtue to vice took only a twitch of adjustment;

and that other lady was off, anyway,

gallivanting for six months of the year,

eating her way to an obesity of spring and summer.

 

Yes, this was the real answer to real needs;

and although she did not understand, at first,

why he had permitted that Orphic egomaniac

to lead her, like some complaisant lamb, from this dream to his,

from mellow dusk to glittery light,

she laughed about it later,

snuggling up against a Plutonic shoulder.

She should have foreseen that the inevitable ineptitude of the human psyche

had merely been utilized by her godly companion

to teach that archaeopteryx of a musician a lesson.

 

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