for John Yau

Security men were opening limousine doors for
diplomats in transit,
someone was reading a page of weak writing
or seeing Pierrot Le Fou for the fifth time,
skin stretched across a young ribcage
warmed to the touch of uncertain fingertips...
these and a thousand other vignettes
or whatever we might later agree to call them
massed in the plaza with placards and banners.
Above them the moon rose, over the official dome,
reminding three or four of some wholly incidental occasion
that, for no even guessable-at reason had been
carried over through successive eras
like the sum of a previous equation.
Each of those so afflicted had a different image
with which to contend.
For one, bric-a-brac in a shop window
a February evening eight years previous;
for another, a bartender telling a joke in a
long defunct nightclub.
It seems, to change the subject, sort of, that we have to
spend a lot of time thinking
about those who practice the same profession as ourselves,
how some are better than we at it, so much better
it hardly seems possible
that our diplomas read the same, and then those sinister
figures, always distant
but active, like crows on the plains at sunset, who botch
every operation and yet are allowed to bungle on
for decades,
as if, somehow, incredibly, no one had noticed or,
worse, had noticed and, gruesomely, approved.
Hunched late over a desk, or on the porch swing not
following the lyrics of your latest companion,
in the background the radio reporting an
incident-free state visit,
your hand moves towards the lurid cover of
a mystery with extra pages.