<\/div>\n

OPERA BY THE LAKE<\/strong><\/p>\n

There was a comatose man.<\/p>\n

A woman took him to Edgewater Park
\nand sat him in a lawn chair.
\nDark glasses and a baseball cap
\nshielded his eyes from the sun.<\/p>\n

A Frisbee came sailing
\nand struck him on the side of the head.<\/p>\n

He woke up in amazement
\nto see a flock of seagulls over the water,<\/p>\n

and wondered where all the mynah birds were.<\/p>\n

It was just a reflection
\nin a playful daydream.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

On a bluff
\nnot far from the Richard Wagner statue,<\/p>\n

a man looked out at Lake Erie
\nand imagined the Pacific Ocean,
\nwith the Hawaiian Islands
\nsomewhere beyond the horizon.<\/p>\n

His stare wasn\u2019t as frozen
\nas the eyes on the monument,<\/p>\n

but in some ways
\nit was just as displaced. <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The composer\u2019s memory was brought here
\nby admiring German immigrants,
\nwho commissioned his image
\nto stand in perpetual ponderance. <\/p>\n

He was a long way from Bayreuth.<\/p>\n

The man gazing out over the lakeshore,
\nwas brought here by a Cleveland woman
\nwho somehow became his wife.<\/p>\n

He was a long way from Kailua.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In an opera that only one man could hear,<\/p>\n

the rhythmic cadence of a shark skin drum,
\nblends with the performance
\nof an orchestra in Berlin,<\/p>\n

as a nearby train joins in
\nand rumbles its wheels upon the tracks.<\/p>\n

~ Joe Balaz<\/p>\n