Sunday, June 2, 2013

note found in dressing room

April 15, 1980

The dressing room lights burn low. But the counter and mirror reflect the dull bulb so it seems brighter in here than it ought to.
I’m alone here, except for the mice all back stage theaters have, scurrying among the costumes and the empty dance shoes flat on the floor near the closet, lined up, waiting for feet to fill them.
I sit for a moment listening to the endlessly rehearsed lines from the stage, which are cast out into the vacuum of empty seats, ricocheting back at the actors like bullets.
I’m one of the few invited guest to this slaughter of language I helped write.
But it is the note left on the counter that interests me: unaddressed, unsigned, small and insignificant in the hay stack mounds of costumes and other abandoned cloth.
“I watched you today,” the note reads, “all during the play, trying to catch your eyes and their glint, and hoping that the sparkle in them was for me.”
At that point a rime fiddles in my thoughts, and I whisper it, soft and low, like a flute playing its solo in the wind:

All in green went
My love riding
On a great horse
Of gold into the
Silver dawn.

I don’t think ee cummings minds my using his words, for strange enough, it is spring and the green is inside me, the greed is the bud of a gentle flower rising to bloom, and my God, I think it might be love.


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