That Century

We are leaving the dance hall to smoke

in the lower tub room, the zinc tub

filled with a hundred blue eels while

a fat Polish woman scalds them by pouring gallons

of clean gin in with them. This is where the migraine

begins for the woman above, she’s fainting

into the arms of George Orwell who makes not

a single sound the long while that they are making love . . .

Some say she fell to the floor and continued groaning

to unbalance the moment

and George went to the corner and smoked

his clay pipe—his lungs were rotten

as if with nesting mice. His friend

picking herself up off the rug said,

“The sun would soon rise fully into the coal tar. And

the cabbage polemic had no real place

in the poetry of this age.” She died in Spain

after a horse with an abscessed tooth

kicked her twice in the forehead.

Snow on the sun. A very weak sun setting in the east.