She passes. The lines blur.
The last part comes by retrospectively,
a shocking ordeal.
Haunted with angels, her childhood
was an instrument of illusion,
a subsequent event.

There, in the Fifties,
leaning against the past:
dark nights of piano duets.

Why did you disappear, Mag?
Your blazing context was always in fashion.
The walls berserk?
Hopes heaped with secular implications?
A bagatelle of birds
mobbed by a serious wind?
I explore the disasters and decide.

Los Angeles author VAHAN GREGORY KRIKORYAN was one of Tom McGrath’s original L.A. Poets 5 in the ‘50s. Gregory was in Martha Foley’s Best American Short Stories 1953, and his 1974 novel Oh Boy, Here Comes Walt! was called “a minor classic” by Robert Kirsch of the L.A. Times.