punch in the recreation room.
I was always cast as Old Man
with tennis-shoe polish for white hair
and lines drawn where my lines now are,
forehead haiku, the eyes’ briffits,
and parentheses around the muzzle.
I guess I miss it, achievement’s sense,
the way a show’s run ends
and everyone knows it together,
a social pain, like the death
of a popular imaginary friend.
When lights between scenes dim,
I like to see actors take props offstage
or team up with stagehands to move
the built elements of our fantasy.
I hope they keep going, and sneak
some of the properties home to mix in
with their private dramas. I pass theaters
the way I pass churches, but like
better this foldable theater
half-constructed in the mind,
sometimes thrown away
along with the day’s receipts.
Nothing’s lost. I carry my own
props in—red telephone,
bowl of apples—and then with me draw
back into the unseen.
The Children’s Theater
One morning I’ll leave the house naked
and stroll down the street, fun for everyone
to be relieved from shame for a moment,
nourishment for my inner scold.
Most people I’ve seen, I’ve seen clothed.
What anyone wore I don’t remember,
while the people I’ve seen nude
I remember everything about, or can I
draw the first nipple I kissed by video light
or the cyclorama of middle-school showers
all of us in awful proportions, half-kid, half-dude.
Classmates with the largest dicks
have been first to die, by misadventure,
cancer, problems of the liver. Still,
most Swedes debut sexually at fifteen
and in China it’s twenty-three.
Everyone in this floating world is naked.
I’m tired of having a body. The mind’s a bore
too, with its video light. On their patio,
my neighbors talk about their bodies
in low voices while the bug zapper
administers its anonymous questionnaire.
Last week I went for an HIV test
at the free clinic below the repair shop
for musical instruments, also
housing a children’s theater,
and I could hear them improvising
as I waited twenty minutes for my blood
to signal the presence or absence
of antibodies. The woman who
administered my test and an anonymous
questionnaire did not believe my story
though it was both rehearsed and true:
the gas station in Nevada, the basin
where I washed up after hours dazed
on the road bloody with a stranger’s
inner life covering my hands,
my face before I noticed. I remember
going to the traveling show of Sweeney Todd
in which my cousin Stuart, trained for opera,
submitted his throat to the “demon barber’s”
stage knife, sending his body down
the ingenious chute, where Angela Lansbury
baked him into pie. His only sung Sondheim
was “a lavabo and a fancy chair.” Lavabo,
from the Psalms: I will wash my hands
in innocency: so will I compass thine altar.
But it just means a sink to wash the blood.
Whose blood? You don’t get more naked
than blood. At the clinic, mine dotted
a simple device to rehearse its speech.
I answered her questions of history, sexual
partnerships, gender, gender preference.
Whether rough or high, or had traveled
to any of the following countries.
Behind the wall’s frank posters and the plush
toy vulvas piled in the corner, some children’s
play dreamed itself into being. We know
without being told that theaters are haunted.
They share with graveyards the whistling taboo,
the seatbacks curved like tombstone tops.
It’s the stage manager’s job to make sure
a light is left on in that cavern when the last
