“Je est un autre”
          —Rimbaud

1
“Hip to all that jazz–,” yet still,
that organ heart expresses his dull pain.
Don’t worry, it will pass with night,
and dawn and the chill of rain.

2
But then above the counterpane,
along the covered surface of my knees,
the white Pierrot must come and sit
and smile at me and sneeze.

3
Oh, white Pierrot, if you please,
are there not two of you?
One in black, perhaps, or grey,
to suit a different mood, a graver hue?

4
No? Then one must do,
will do quite well to sit above the counterpane.
Pierrot, my boy, there are tombstones in your eyes,
and your arms are full of the dripping rain.

5
Turn from the window, Love, turn from the rain,
and come to bed with me.
Pierrot has filled my eyes with clownish pain
and the rain is on my knee.

©2008, Jack Peachum

Jack Peachum is a sometime poet and actor who lives in a haunted old manse, The Venable’s House, in Clarksville, Virginia, with many ghosts, his wife Julia and a lovely bulldog named Eleanor. Several of his poems appear in our other seasonal anthologies: “Virginia in Spring” in the spring collection, “Cottonwood Summer” and “Julep Season” in the summer collection.

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