After The Ball......In Two Voices, Mother & Son Poem by John Tansey

Son:
After the breakdown,
euphoric fits in a room
lit by one candlelight of pretense
denying the end of marriage,
you twirled by yourself on the floor.

Softly shading your moods
to the subdued warmth of lamps
cloaked in the hue of a man,
have you always denied
the life that direct light imposed?

Floating through the rooms
veiled in scarves
and talismans of tarnished silver,
was it illusion you followed after
in the trailing ripple of curtains?

Mother:

Mine was the black in magic;
romance that dined
among shadows shaping someone
of another time,
and yet it was madness
that watched love burn his clothes I draped,

Too near to the warmth of its flame-
This masquerade of marriage
consumed by the brutish pale
of a bare light bulb
intruding upon my dream,
dispelled it for the fraud it became.

Unveiling back to its drab walls,
the smoke-filled mirrors
of my delusion-
I awoke each morning
divorced by this truth, robed
in its tattered ruins of daylight.