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For Jill and Oscar
and for J. Robert Lennon
Contents
When I Was Living in New York City
Playing Banjo
Karaoke
The Immortals
Run the Red Lights
PART TWO
Hurry
Waves
Showering at Night
Paintings and Drawings
Cafe Racer
The Shadow of Eros Covers the Scene of Loss
My Bodyguard
Red Desert (Antonioni, 1964)
The Second Spider
Looking for Work
Fladry
PART THREE
When
Sparrow
Unknow the Dying Sea
Rail Station under Construction
Listening to Radio at Work
Downstream
Free Climb
Black Rolling Bag
Hamlet and Gretel
About the Author
Also by Ed Skoog
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Special Thanks
Gwendolyn Brooks Park, Topeka
A creek, like a paper fold, runs
one corner to the other
out where the roof of the dead
mall directs sunset to irradiate
her name, in city-carved letters, gold,
the wood around them green.
And then at midnight,
apartment windows hold
star and satellite in the cold
twenty or thirty blocks
from first breath of her infancy
in one of the few cities
(Tupelo and Pretoria are others)
that carries the letters for poet
without port or point in its name.
PART ONE
Being in Plays
Ethics are learned from who you sleep with
the first few times, and theater is sex,
almost. Being in it, I mean, and being young,
with a lot of group undressing
and silence in darkness, chaste
permissions of the cast party,
spiked 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,