I Eat Poetry

Old Women in Eliot Poems
David Wright

1

With fine hair on their arms,
with Michelangelo on their lips,
who do not understand the play at all,

not at all—still sing such lovely trills,
for someone, and dance rhumbas
on the beach, and pinch sugar cookies

between pale fingers. Go on.
The moonlight and ragtime
will not last. Go on now.

The evening crumbles
like thin dough or sand,
which both taste the same.

2

Are not so old, too old
but still rather distant.
high up, perhaps in peach

trees that he does not dare
climb, because he stares
down instead at cigarette

butts and lamplight dropped
on streets or bridges, fuller
than he notices. The wild

and wicked rhyme seduces
even the coolest cats
with the deepest blues.

The wicked, deep, wild blues
of the music hall will win:
look up and sing, for Christ's

sake, look up and moan
in time until a hollow
chapel echoes the sweetest

dying syncopated prayers:
hurry up and live, darling,
hurry up, now, and live.