Our large auditorium
is much like
the inside of a barrel
with support beams exposed
like locked staircases over
hanging,
and on the walls
painted men flourish
in golden frames.
On stage the speaker
sits off to the side looking
at her lecture notes as
she nods her head.
She then moves towards the
podium
and begins to read aloud–
(With her words a thin sheath
unravels;
Its surface, the edifice, is plied
back.)
“The title is
He’s Gone
1.
Did you ever know him?
No I didn’t.
What’s the weather like today?
In this text,
the reader sees as much as he
wants to see
and it is a series of “routines.”
2.
An old man stares into the
dark empty room from the
looking glass.
He sees under the sign
that reads ‘Western Europe,’
20 stacks of newspapers in 2
vertical columns.
He is a voyeur–
and the beautiful woman
is locked in a cage.”
Interlude:
This is about a poem being
read in memoriam.
It is being read
like a gold watch
though time is obstructed–
the old man who
cannot be with his lover,
Europe, stands in for the boy
who is no longer with us.
We sit here today
in silence remembering
how we ought to have said
hello to him.
The boy never spoke to any
one, though he beckons to
another.
Inter-zone:
His mother sits on her hands,
pressing them against her
matted white gown on a
broken bed. Her quiet son
is now dead–
There is nothing to relieve her,
no verse that can unify
her thoughts and make grief
more defined.
She cannot capsule it in rhyme
like a sized-out square
pattern
taken under the needle and
plied with thread,
to hatch and pin down
her darkening undertow.
But even so,
after months of sitting
and nodding one’s head while
peering with a side-long
glance, the verse is made and
this strange looking
is so sought after:
“It seemed as though
her boy saw life through
books like they were
undulating suspended grains
or small specks of party colors
in a marble held up to his eye.
The funereal mother knows
she is now alone.
Alcestis longs for her child.”
I love you I love you I love….
Her hands are by her sides and
her dark hair clings to her
shoulders. She lies still on
the bed for the speaker
ringing out notes.