Askold Skalsky 

Candide on the Garden’s Verge

Finally the dervish slammed the door
on their importunities,

gracing them with questions
flung back upon the questioners.

Anything else would have enlightened them
before their time, like the jewels
in the sheep sacks of El Dorado
that they had dragged from the high cliffs of the paradise
they couldn’t bear to stay in.

The truth is they had been waiting
for this, come to assert their transient pieties,
wanting another world intact, only better
than the damp Westphalian castle,
its large baroness, and pretty breasts behind a screen.
Why should he have left them with anything other
than the analogue of their disabused hearts,

sifted through weary cleverness,
the vocabulary of a dark elenchus?

What secrets he had, he kept,
knowing that they would neither
tear their hair not slit their throats,
surrendering the familiar horrors
under every chapter head,

their treks snuffed out,

stopped in the twenty acres of their worst nightmare
to cultivate their ruins
among candied citrons and pistachios.

After he shut the door in their faces,
he began to dance.

______

Askold Skalsky lives in Maryland.