the summer garden party

in a summer overcast, we will congregate,
old men with alcohol-scented tears 
and old wives with long-forgotten spare lovers.

i will peer, through hazy clouded eyes
toward one of you, gravity-bent and lurid,
hovering over the gift, the emblem set before you.

a single candle lit, stuck obliquely into its center
by palsied and shaking hands,
for one of you to wheeze over
and smother.

we will applaud weakly, jealously,
over what has tried to kill you and failed,
over the candle which is one of us,
extinguished before we next wheeze over our own.

©2000 Timothy A. Clark