The Night of the Sorrowful Grace

Truth to tell is easily

Come by. Lies to embroider
(And when was the last time you
Embroidered anything more
Daring than a small sampler
Exclaiming out cross-stitched thoughts
You thought were clever, if that?

[I'm unkind, I know, unkind
And unknown, given over
To bad parenthetical
Groans of expostulation,
Excused slightly, if at all,
By the fact of having lived
A parenthetical life

{Not marginal, mind you,
I wouldn't claim a status
As fashionable as that,
All retro as a vinyl
Pillbox hat, boxed and shrink-wrapped,
Just a sort of encysted
Existence in the middle

Of things past, forgettable,
Res gestae, as yearbooks say}.].)
Are the rarest creations,
Those daring fictions despised
By gods and cosmologists
Who want their thread counts threadbare
And faithful, thin but untrue.