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
actor’s gone home, stagehands to the bar:
the spirit light, one bulb to keep company.
Of course, my blood maintained its old narrative
and I left with my burden lifted, or shifted.
Behind the wall, child actors assembled comedy.
Because my cousin had done it, and family
spoke proudly of him, I wanted to be an actor
and made the customary adolescent gestures
toward it. Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou
signed his portion of the AIDS Memorial Quilt
the way we signed one another’s playbills
after the run of a high-school play, some inside
jokes that even we forgot the story of, that mask
the love between people who wear masks.
Not much was said of him after that, alas.
Plays scare, endear me, even a children’s summer
production, or wherever in suspended belief
a figure steps forward, outstretches
costumed hand and pronounces my name.
Grateful Dead Tapes
Even though we’ve already been dead,
when I find two trays of Grateful Dead tapes
in a Missoula secondhand store,
I too feel bound in the stasis of cassette,
plastic cases scarred and cracked
like old scuba goggles. Some retain
the delicate peg that lets the door swing open;
some have broken, maybe from a fall
when someone slid too fast the van door open
in a hot parking lot. Could be no tragedy
made the tapes secondhand greater
than a lost interest. Used to listen to them,
the owner might say, the way you adjust
to walking past a grave. I love him, or her,
who curated these happenings, although
the Dead’s not really my bag. I follow
other melodies and injured visions, draw
my cider from another press, a cooler lava.
I saw them once, summer of ’95 at RFK,
with my friend Jax. It was terrible,
a lot of twentieth-century business came due
at once. Bob Dylan opened unintelligible
and sleepy as if reaching from the frost
to make known “in