Enter Smiling Carolyn Bessette

after “Another Day” by Stephen Dunn

1.

Girl as pioneer: she fits the bill perfectly, she is fresher

than the unbidden moon, which has followed her to this

collection of roundness, a hyper-elegant orchard devoid

of laughter or insight or real fruit. She nightmares, fitful,

throws a fit, is nightmarish. Carolyn charms, sells,

and rescinds the charm—she has held your emotions hostage,

torture named desire, the succubus that invades sanctuary.

When the moon rises in the early evening, she is there to bite.

2.

In Wyoming, or some other great midwestern state

where Caro never studied being social or shouted in a park,

some untamed mare snorts canyon dust, while elsewhere

near Camelot another dust is prepared by a tall palamino.

She experiences no crises of faith, because faith is found

only in dressing rooms, ballrooms, any crowded room

where she might revise the persona—ars simulacro—

and hook another easy-catch trout peeking from the river.

She tinkers, dawdles, strays, commands. No man keeps her.

3.

After the aircraft accident, she lived in the conditional—

would have, should have. Charm is a sort of magic,

devil-sent to punish the soft pioneer, for allowing herself to be

kept, tethered by a man, hooked the way she had hooked

unapologetically. Her grounding was caused by spatial

disorientation, bitten moon charming the pilot and drowning

the succubus, who was tied to the plane seat to watch

Icarus her husband fly too close to the devastating moon.