Alice Friman
Surely experience taught him,when rapture,
like a white glow pursued, goes dim,
out of focus, blank,
that fortune
doesn’t always cycle. And luck, earned
or not but strutted like a captain’s uniform,
is doomed to shrink
into a pocket: a lucky charm
reduced to the wad of paper it was wrapped in.
For didn’t I see—reflected in his eyes
that morning over breakfast—the town he built
to cradle the dream where his princess slept
crumble in slow motion, each cobblestone,
each rose-covered foolishness? What was left
remained glued in his face—some wild
hope a mother would have put, must have
before the deep seams of teasing disappointments
that age, when he wasn’t looking, had gotten ahead of him
to grind in.