Horatio's for the Caricatures

Diffident tragedies lace threaded night skies
with abstractions on pastels,
Curiously the stars wane away towards the sun
so said canvas is free of any notoriety,
Faint violins where Fitzgerald calmly dines
under a city dusk so shrewd and invalid,
His pen hosts masquerades as he whisks an abstraction
past the clear atramentous sky—
In between a burlesque mask
witness Corvus become a resplendent
in flight mo(u)rning dove,
And a bearer Ophiuchus sways with his angel
in white evening gloves,
Veered stars an illumination in masks,
So now he may smile and write,
Tragedies once evident in diffidence
now burn endlessly in an afternoon sunlight—
Caricature.
Look up towards the stars, how they dance in their masks
with stillness till the masquerade dawns, and he says:
“If only they were reluctant,
to repeating the past . . .”