The Solitary Actor

Marblehead, MA; July, 2003

“Love is not drama,” she said.
And so the conversation ended.
No exit. No stage. No right.
All the words had been expended
Still nothing understood
And I had been reduced
To parsing the definition of drama
So keenly
It had lost all meaning
Save that of an incoherent wail of a baby
Glomming attention.
On the other hand,
I could reject not just hers, but all limitations
Those casualties on either side
Of the battle for communication;
I could simply allow the thought
In all its formless truth to enter,
A thought beyond
Even the hierarchies of the Greeks:
Choruses whose mouths were filled
By the grapes of characters,
Characters filled by the ink of poets,
Poets filled by the surprise of circumstance,
Circumstance wheeled by the haughty, giddy Gods
In heavens formed by the restless body
Of the universe,
All parts of a whole
All thinking alone
With the results
(As the dialog turns to soliloquy):
Comedy
Tragedy.
But this truth was, finally, me
In an echoing amphitheatre,
My expressions perfect,
But no one there to hear
Save the wind, which may carry
A part of my echo
To a village where the sounds are mingled
Like metals from a hammer,
Lending some vibrance, some color, some spice—
Free of me to see what was lost,
Free of any other notion than that of a creating God
Dispersing seeds in deepest love
And impenetrable mystery,
Like the beautiful roars in caves
That gives the frightened sailors
A sense of community
(That are really the many voices
Of forever lost sailors crying to be heard)—
Both sets of sailors have sighed
At the singular lights in the sky
That in their aloneness
Remind us we are not alone
And never tell us why.

The surface we see is a curtain,
The eyes behind a mask,
The acts more of joy and pain than truth allows,
The endings merest gasps—
Markers between the forms we assume,
As we sing in lower keys our different tunes.