Duet by Dan Pettee

A semi-Siamese togetherness is theirs-
joined not by ligature by but belief. Youth
and beauty dissolving like the sun in haze,
fading like last year’s clothes, they shore their sure
defenses, speak in droll parables, share excitations
on the far border of ritual. Somewhere along the way,
they say, the pattern went awry: time’s truths appeared
like uninvited guests, sharp corners failed to meet. And now,
on cookie-crumbling streets in make-believing towns,
they clutch charades, pursue the perfect stop-time frame, frozen at
the roller coaster’s dizzy summit, less
the plummeting.
                           Like tightly wound tops they court
endless queenly whirl-caresses leading nowhere,
precisely high. All bonds are monitored for balance
on a fulcrum of exactitude; approaching equilibrium,
they find that all their checks and balances proliferate
like germs beneath a microscope’s omniscient eye;
illusions taunt them in the mirrored glass
surrounding them at midnight and beyond.
Love sheds its image in a passing train’s
streaked glass and vanishes…
                                                    Time travelers,
they will come, at last, to that current
which they cannot ford; the vain accouterments
will fail to hide the grooves of age, watermarks
of time’s toll. Their truths will roll into a sphere
of images they’ll carry on a thin, quicksilver chain.
Anchored, then, to the outcome of an unfamiliar plot,
they’ll pass the waning days at sea,
drifting, drifting….

Dan Pettee