LA TRAVIATA

Who can resist Anna Netrebko in red jacquard, 
bird-of-paradise on a bone-plain stage singing,
Follie! Follie!

Her beauty like a tightened bow,
as Yeats wrote in 1910, poems my mother read
at the suggestion of her boyfriend, who

was no Paris, though she was a Helen of sorts:
married but swept off to another house,
where firelike she consumed Yeats and Tolstoy

and, I assume, fancied herself a courtesan
possessing a beauty dangerous indeed;
but that Christmas we had her,

and while the opera played in our rag-rug apartment,
by her shining eyes and yelps of approval
I determined my mother longed to be

what she already was,
and I’m scratching for simpler speech,
to uncover the single word or phrase that names,

indicts, and forgives in a breath;
unearth the right myth to tell me
what is not and is therefore bearable.

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