An Actor Auditions for Archangel
My mother’s ascension
She was a character who lived out louder than the box allowed. She showed up in stories as what could or couldn’t be said. She said we said she thought too carefully about putting on the same shoes the same way every day and every night, leaving the same impression on the same bed.
She left it smoothed out, wed, though she was. She pretended that anyone could have slept there. The greater world was full of small things she couldn’t see — magnetism, solar winds, immaculate congress, cosmic orgone, wrong directions, the right idea. Tripping fantastic is what it seems. Just don’t fall for anything. The queue of darkness is visible and narrows the eyes as if the brightest sunlight is only a glancing blow, queers the endless night.
The scent of your makeup lingers in the air. The audition is a shiver of Butoh’s whispering skin. Motionless shadows walk off the script, and white dust floats in the footlights.
A gaffer’s tools, your drunk husband wields a tradesman’s studied grief with whatever tack of stars failed the future his doped in hope held sway. The light promised still had a finger curled on the valve of your heart.
But breathing hope was never filled with music, but a seizure of sorts, like the back of the line waiting for a better excuse to accept the end that never comes, so the more often you would bend it, meant
nothing straight made sense. Love gets in the way of the directions. Says: Stay curious, be alert; be as simple as a peeled whorl of a girl swallowing an edible nasturtium, which is the peace you once were, shelved. This was a start; you’ll never
see yourself that way again because
his money struck through the darkness, and being paid for the light in your hair was a full-time job. When you’d had enough of that beating and lost the weight of your commiserations, your bones hollowed spume sprouted wings, and you said you could rise above anything.
There’s a walk-on for the voice of the endless waves heard in the horn of a conch — the role of filling in the beach bench with the sand of time blowing through the glare. Which was not in you anywhere. Suppose it was all the B roll anyway, right? Through and through. There’s another end to it, though. Blown on, the trumpet side softly cued shimmers off in the blue light loft,
and if you lean hard enough on it, it becomes the horn of the procession. If the walls come down when the wind falls flat, you’ll become a zephyr dancing; you’ll inherit the sky.
