Miss Otis Regrets

[jisbell00]

Miss Otis Regrets


This world of muck and compromise does not
require us to be perfect. When the sun
lifts in the East and day begins the plot
of waking, then how will our day be done?

In also-rans, in cloud and circumstance.
Yet we imagine better in our mind –
and thus, we put on music. In the chance
and happenstance of key and time, the blind

determinacy of it, we begin
a life of order and of definition.
Miss Otis in her song still cannot win
reprieve from the machine, for her condition

is rhyme and number. All the things she tries,
each cause and consequence return the mind
to that lunch she cannot attend. Her eyes,
though closed or open, cannot hope to find

some new path into freedom where we do
just as we please as we step off the grid.
She lives instead where three must follow two –
where crystals form, where we cannot be hid

from order. And the voice of Ella weeps,
to speak this truth. She weeps, to know a soul
might thus be prisoner – though Ella keeps
perfection in her tone, just as the whole

band frame this lynching in consummate art.
Miss Otis sins and she is sinned against.
She will not be at lunch, and thus we start
and end this number. Thus, her song is fenced.