Run the Red Lights. Ed Skoog

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СКАЧАТЬ gone home, stagehands to the bar:

      the spirit light, one bulb to keep company.

      Of course, my blood maintained its old narrative

      and I left with my burden lifted, or shifted.

      Behind the wall, child actors assembled comedy.

      Because my cousin had done it, and family

      spoke proudly of him, I wanted to be an actor

      and made the customary adolescent gestures

      toward it. Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou

      signed his portion of the AIDS Memorial Quilt

      the way we signed one another’s playbills

      after the run of a high-school play, some inside

      jokes that even we forgot the story of, that mask

      the love between people who wear masks.

      Not much was said of him after that, alas.

      Plays scare, endear me, even a children’s summer

      production, or wherever in suspended belief

      a figure steps forward, outstretches

      costumed hand and pronounces my name.

Grateful Dead Tapes

      Even though we’ve already been dead,

      when I find two trays of Grateful Dead tapes

      in a Missoula secondhand store,

      I too feel bound in the stasis of cassette,

      plastic cases scarred and cracked

      like old scuba goggles. Some retain

      the delicate peg that lets the door swing open;

      some have broken, maybe from a fall

      when someone slid too fast the van door open

      in a hot parking lot. Could be no tragedy

      made the tapes secondhand greater

      than a lost interest. Used to listen to them,

      the owner might say, the way you adjust

      to walking past a grave. I love him, or her,

      who curated these happenings, although

      the Dead’s not really my bag. I follow

      other melodies and injured visions, draw

      my cider from another press, a cooler lava.

      I saw them once, summer of ’95 at RFK,

      with my friend Jax. It was terrible,

      a lot of twentieth-century business came due

      at once. Bob Dylan opened unintelligible

      and sleepy as if reaching from the frost

      to make known “in life I was Bob Dylan.”

      The Dead would play five more stands:

      Auburn Hills, Pittsburgh, Noblesville,

      Maryland Heights, Chicago, then done,

      those last shows, autobiographies of indulgence.

      Lightning struck a branch. We left early.

      Tapers caught every note of the show.

      You can hear it forever at archive.org.

      In my greatest period of disorientation

      the Dead, like death, seemed best avoided.

      Yet I was the sort who might admit

      a simplifying affection like the Dead.

      I remember, coming down in a cornfield

      near a creek at dawn, talking it out with Jason

      whether those trees were weird, or that

      weirdness took the form of trees,

      and every woman I pursued

      had a pet cat that made me sneeze.

      They either liked the Dead or Neil

      Diamond. Yet I would persevere,

      like one with a disorder, hanging

      in the doorway to their petite kitchens

      while they ground coffee, or searched

      the crisper for a roommate’s hidden beer.

      I longed to become more elaborate,

      my approaches too simple and still are,

      ask anyone about pleasure’s light opera

      and the children’s music of the first kiss,

      the hair metal of the second. And now

      I play the Dead around the house.

      It’s children’s music. We play operettas,

      Pinafore, Penzance, for the same reasons,

      because they are kind and almost meaningless.

      I make few claims. What lasts is awkward

      chance, like this thrift-store wrench

      anthologized on pegboard, or smudges

      on a yellow phone. I’m not buying

      the tapes today. The price isn’t marked

      and the clerk’s busy. I keep what marriage

      and child need, a few books and held-back objects,

      metal or paper, letters from old loves,

      because letters are antique, and for

      the limestone antiquity of those affections.

Ode to the Macarena

      The chair I’m sitting on is mostly nothing.

      Electrons go right through СКАЧАТЬ