Читать книгу Run the Red Lights - Ed Skoog - Страница 9

The Children’s Theater

One morning I’ll leave the house naked

and stroll down the street, fun for everyone

to be relieved from shame for a moment,

nourishment for my inner scold.

Most people I’ve seen, I’ve seen clothed.

What anyone wore I don’t remember,

while the people I’ve seen nude

I remember everything about, or can I

draw the first nipple I kissed by video light

or the cyclorama of middle-school showers

all of us in awful proportions, half-kid, half-dude.

Classmates with the largest dicks

have been first to die, by misadventure,

cancer, problems of the liver. Still,

most Swedes debut sexually at fifteen

and in China it’s twenty-three.

Everyone in this floating world is naked.

I’m tired of having a body. The mind’s a bore

too, with its video light. On their patio,

my neighbors talk about their bodies

in low voices while the bug zapper

administers its anonymous questionnaire.

Last week I went for an HIV test

at the free clinic below the repair shop

for musical instruments, also

housing a children’s theater,

and I could hear them improvising

as I waited twenty minutes for my blood

to signal the presence or absence

of antibodies. The woman who

administered my test and an anonymous

questionnaire did not believe my story

though it was both rehearsed and true:

the gas station in Nevada, the basin

where I washed up after hours dazed

on the road bloody with a stranger’s

inner life covering my hands,

my face before I noticed. I remember

going to the traveling show of Sweeney Todd

in which my cousin Stuart, trained for opera,

submitted his throat to the “demon barber’s”

stage knife, sending his body down

the ingenious chute, where Angela Lansbury

baked him into pie. His only sung Sondheim

was “a lavabo and a fancy chair.” Lavabo,

from the Psalms: I will wash my hands

in innocency: so will I compass thine altar.

But it just means a sink to wash the blood.

Whose blood? You don’t get more naked

than blood. At the clinic, mine dotted

a simple device to rehearse its speech.

I answered her questions of history, sexual

partnerships, gender, gender preference.

Whether rough or high, or had traveled

to any of the following countries.

Behind the wall’s frank posters and the plush

toy vulvas piled in the corner, some children’s

play dreamed itself into being. We know

without being told that theaters are haunted.

They share with graveyards the whistling taboo,

the seatbacks curved like tombstone tops.

It’s the stage manager’s job to make sure

a light is left on in that cavern when the last

actor’s 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.