The Impresario (part nine)

The Impresario

Part Nine

To a sheltering place

Like a sea bird flown

High where rays of sun make gentle

Winter’s violent froth and foam

He sees a lonely man below

Whose feet set on a cliff’s edge stumble

The fit passes, in commotion of known voices

Pierre can’t stop them crowding past the tent fly

One kicks at Tortu’s basket and a melée

Erupts as trufflers after coins go rooting

The Dauphin, helpless, shirtless, hugged by Regalus

She shames the impresario, her thoughtless heart

Wherein dwell only love and courage

Now he leaps

Atop the wagon’s bed

And seizing Poupée’s silver ring

Strikes a chiming note again and again

With his dagger’s blade

He had been warned

The words made diffident and softly pleading

“I know you for a gentleman, monsieur

I ask you nothing, what you do with her

This thing within the town is little known

I pray that it remain so.”

But…it is his living being savaged

It is the Bishop’s fair, he will be banished

A thing so wrong and yet a thing so small

Malign a soul already damned to Hell?

He knows the lid has not been nailed

And yet it does not yield

His blade snaps, springing free

Wrought with the jagged shape of a letter Z

The wine butt now half-breached and lid atilt

A vapor seems to rise

Such as from which might Oracle prophesy

Impresario

Part Ten

(2017, Stephanie Foster)