Ode for Olga

Half-remembered waltzes clutter the living room
as the electric kettle hisses me offstage.
I open your old passport,
the faded red leather covers
like pressed rose petals.

Camera flash: the face of a poet and a muse.
The face of a penniless aristocrat
in beggarly rags,
against which glimmer
a grandmother’s antediluvian pearls.

Faeries quarrel in pink tulle
while you scrub the dressing rooms to a shimmer,
hard floor punishing young knees,
chemical stench harassing hands and nostrils
like an afterparty creep.
Love is a chemical. So are dreams.

A snapshot of you and Dasha
(again that poet-muse face)
now consigned to a Facebook ephemeron.
Oscar Wilde as a woman,
cigarette doomed to stay unlit,
the pale other,
the mystique of female friendship,
the romance
of photographic blur—

all these things I aspire to be
while you unaffectedly are.
I never learned to play an instrument,
never felt like a foreigner,
never fell in love for real.
Beloved rival, were we each other in another life?

︎