By Bruce Weigl

Featured Art: Woman at Her Toilette by Edgar Degas

Now, as the popular girl walks among us with the microphone,
most of the stories are about loss,
or include exquisitely precise medical and pharmaceutical details,
as if the words could suture the wounds, or save us even one last breath.
I came here to dance with the Puerto Rican women
of my class of 1967, and to remember a few pals lost in the war,
who had been so beautiful, you were happy just to look upon them,
and one more
lost to his own drunken wildness
under a moon who doesn’t remember us.
It’s not a going back we long for, but a staying still
for one incomparable moment, all the lost loves’ faces
spinning in the mirrored ball.