All I can do is sit on a divan
and watch the world of Mean and Meaningless
stroll by, arm in arm, in their brief pavane,
the dance of peacocks’ and peahens’ process.
First, find out what divan means, a word from
another century, as all of us
who watch, still, from a parlor, have become,
incongruous if not notorious
as silence, focus, introspection, ex-
trospection. The Benign as Radical.
Marginalization, like a third sex,
has made us moot as it empowers. We call
it like it is: You’ll swear That’s true and smile
if you sit on the sofa too awhile.
James B. Nicola is the author of six collections of poetry, the latest being Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense. His decades of working in the theater culminated in the nonfiction book Playing the Audience: The Practical Guide to Live Performance, which won a Choice award.
