Backstage is such a hole compared to the house,
the lobby, the balcony, even the restroom—
dark corners, funny smells, greasepaint and mildew,
all the dust of theater ghosts left since the first curtain call.
Backstage thin hallways, no wider in places that your shoulders.
You stand sideways, back against the backside of the proscenium,
flat black and pocked plywood, looking fine on their side only.
Ropes, cables, counterweights, power cords smeared with oil—
you are no more than a prop yourself, standing there
in the slip of air between the wings passing time with the graffiti
marked high and low by generations of exuberant closing-night casts—
names that have gone now—I mean that have stayed—
while those who they belonged to... Maybe I can find someone I know.
Jack something. Jasper. Who’s that? Ellen Roseberg. Janice G-something.
James no last name. A lot of Ja- names in show biz. I’ve noticed that.
Jason Bostick. I wonder if he’s back here somewhere,
or in the greenroom over a border of bulbs around a mirror—
always operating at about 75% with the rest burnt, loose or missing—
the heat of the greenroom. As the audience settles itself, I remember
seeing Nora, Nora Ephron I want to say, but that couldn’t have been it—
she bent over and I looked right down her blouse. She seemed older
than I was at sixteen. Those tits. Even now. Looking down her shirt
and she didn’t know. And Jay opened the bathroom on Laura, peeing.
When she came out, he bounded up to make a joke of it.
“That or feel awkward for weeks,” he reasoned. He was right.
That time Frank Brady had me over to his house after a show
and laughed and said “Look at what my mom sent me!”
A diagram of a hemorrhoid. TMI. She must’ve sent it for a reason.
But I did the standard thing: switched the subject,
pretended it didn’t happen. I haven’t seen him in 25 years.
The last audience is seated. A change in the air echoes back here.
There’s the microphone, watercolor light, curtains. I’m not ready
in this tight black netherworld nowhere. They should make this place
like the entry to a slaughterhouse, like that autistic doctor did.
What’s-her-name. Funny name. Sojourner. Journey. Prentiss. Shirley.
How she designed slaughter plants so cows wouldn’t fear so much,
so they could be held kindly and go peaceful. Doctor Azure. Doctor Bliss.
Doctor Cradle. Doctor Donnybrook. The gates open ahead.
Light takes my face.
I’m on.
This would work well as a monologue. I think it needs some chiseling and sculpting to transform it into an outstanding poem. Right now it sounds too much like prose - needs more attention to poetic rhythm, word choice, syntactical surprise. It would be worth the work required if you're up for it--you've got some good emotional material here. I enjoy reading & rereading it.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Ed. I think you are right. The style is a lot looser than I usually get, so I felt hampered by inexperience while trying to edit it. I have less sense about how to work a poem like this than to make a more formal poem.
ReplyDeleteI really like this. I'm stage managing this summer, and as I read your poem I can feel that crazy rush of images past and present that come backstage - where modesty seldom reigns! I'd love to hear you perform this piece someday.
ReplyDeleteI think one reason why I enjoy it, in this dense form, is because it captures the density of the not-quite-remembered, the heft of behind-the-curtains. Behind the curtains of my own memories, shrouded and almost suffocated in the liminal space-between, the memory-between. The form echoes the point, the point that the mind in this in-between can't come to a point, can't surface. That memory is an elision, a confusion, a wire-crossing transfixing, a fixture of confabulation and near-misses, almost-transgressions. The nerviness of almost-surfacing onto the stage (of life, or literally) crosses our wires. That density, how well proposed by these thickets and densities of half-remembered tangled skeins. Even this comment, so inspired, is itself half-poem, half-beckoning, half-erasure, an echo of the echo in the poem.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment/poem/echo, Scooter. You said it just right.
ReplyDelete