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The Judge at Work

The ash on her cigar
hasn't fallen, though she still
smokes after all these years.
It extends over a mile now
from her high, austere
bench down the courtroom aisle,
out the double walnut doors
kept open in all weather
for the sake of this sheer
incomparable stupor,
past the squat statue
of the oblivious hero's smile
by the water fountain,
across Main Street whose traffic
has long been mazily diverted
elsewhere, through the abandoned
Woolworth's (its letters golden
still above the blank plate glass),
and so on to the mythic
edge of town, suspended
there like a ramrod
waiting for its barrel,
or, if you come toward it head-
on, a burnt-out eye deeper
than lineage or culture.
Not even the winos marvel
anymore at what's come to pass
through their dilapidated
park they manage to duck
under it blotto, are
unfazed by its nonbibulous
spirit level, neither bar
nor horizon, but in their
skewed view, appropriate
somehow. Less addlepated,
joggers simply reroute.
No one seems to remark
either, or integrate,
the small cries angelic,
perforate that also hover
sometimes around the whim
of the law, little choruses
of mercy once called for
under the wide panoply
of passion and seraphim.
Whatever hypnotic effect
this slow growth had on the jury
became long ago moot; the verdict,
though, enacts itself in the fine
stretch of waste shaping decades,
fired but not gone, like a tune
seared into the mind, whose words
are vapor song and mind, yes,
both burned into sheer ghosts
that bear, indelibly, all duress
without wavering, pure branded air
you can neither remember
nor hear again music
inhering in the way we are:
being. We have come to accept,
just so, the judge at work
salutary, incorrupt
drawing breath through the unfailing
tube of her meditation,
at one with herself, inhaling,
making the thin circle of flame
that fades to ash, keeping time.

Dabney Stuart
The Georgia Review
Spring 2003