Bookstore Ballerina

After James Masao Mitsui's “For the Ballerina in Death Valley Junction Who Has Painted Her Own Audience on a Canvas and Stretched It, Facing the Stage.”

Yes, I know the place, the detail is just
As you describe it, but there've been a few additions
These 20 years: the ballerina, for one, is pushing 90,
There's also a hotel, with half of it roped off
Due to “ghost infestation.” And, included with admission
Is the museum, of her entire artful life,
How she pranced on many a presumed stage for exiled royalty,
And the gilded player piano she constructed
That plays so fast and so continuously
There could be no doubt that she is mad.
And when the audience “bows again
To the relentless applause of her art,”
They know not what is living, what is legacy, what they believe in,
For their eyes are taken by the magician,
By flash powder summoning life.
I know in my bones how that artistry works,
How all of us dream of art,
And the vapors of our dream can seem like gas light
On wet, cobblestoned streets with buckled shoes,
Things that were, that are no more.

I found your book at Barnes & Noble,
Lined up for a kind of applause between Bukowski, Frost and Dante.
While others sought out “Relationships for Dummies,”
I tried to find escape in this slaughterhouse of thoughts
In the aisle not taken, in the words that looked
So fierce upon the page. Even they, I saw, were hiding
The meaning of my life from me, by hinting at some property
In the privacy of their leaves, at a price I would obey.

Found your few and careful words, as near as a ghost.
Even that was far too much.