The title “Scandal” is a joke: real intrigue, the speaker suggests, isn’t a window in Greenwich Village or hyacinths growing “like little puce poems out of a sick soul.” That line makes human gossip sound cramped and self-involved. She wants bigger rumors—“cosmic hearsay.” Who tilted the moon? What do winds do to canyons beneath tall stars? Even Neptune gets recast as a lecherous old man craning over his bald-head moons to peek at a skyscraper’s twinkling heel.
The tone is wry and a little impatient, but also dreamy. Ridge turns the universe into a lively, mischievous neighborhood where planets and winds are more scandalous than the small dramas people usually whisper about. The mood is playful, sardonic, and strangely expansive, as if she is asking: why settle for petty gossip when the sky is full of stranger stories?