The Exact Sum That moment when the moon’s a pyre and they’re waxed and packed for a day on the pier, bikinis and tubs of block, flowery shorts and flagons, and the cars won’t start. And why is the sun so close at six o’clock, where the breaking dawn sings the morning’s last birdsong? And he knows he’s at the halting hearth when they sing hallelujahs to the firestorm and he remembers that the flash and dance is beyond Alpha to Omega, he, the helpless corpse in the lather of his second shroud. It’s his time, he who knew the dots and commas before the burlesque wrote that blood in the arteries communes with the cold of a midnight moon. Arthur Broomfield
22
