The Morning Reading: "Nothing much changes in the glittering rooms of the heart"

15
by Charles Wright

You still love the ones you loved
back when you loved them—books.
Records, and people.
Nothing much changes in the glittering rooms of the heart,
Only the dark spaces half-reclaimed.
And then not much,
An image, a line. sometimes a song.

Car doors slam, and slam again, next door.
Snow nibbles away at the edges of the dark ground.
The sudden memory of fur coats,
erotic and pungent,
On college girls in the backseats of cars, at Christmas,
Bourgeois Americana, the middle 1950s,
Appalachia downtown.

And where were we going? Nowhere.
Someone's house, the club, a movie?
See the pyramids along the Nile,
WKPT, I'm itching like a man on a fizzy tree.
It didn't matter.
Martin Karant was spinning them out,
and the fur was so soft.

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