Читать книгу By the Numbers - James Richardson - Страница 8

In Shakespeare

In Shakespeare a lover turns into an ass

as you would expect. Others confuse

their consciences with ghosts and witches.

Old men throw everything away

when they panic and can’t feel their lives.

They pinch themselves, pierce themselves with twigs,

cliffs, lightning, to die—yes, finally—in glad pain.

You marry a woman you’ve never talked to,

a woman you thought was a boy.

Sixteen years go by as a curtain billows

once, twice. Your children are lost,

they come back, you don’t remember how.

A love turns to a statue in a dress, the statue

comes back to life. O god, it’s all so realistic

I can’t stand it. Whereat I weep and sing.

Such a relief to burst from the theater

into our cool, imaginary streets

where we know who’s who and what’s what,

and command with MetroCards our destinations.

Where no one with a story struggling in him

convulses as it eats its way out,

and no one in an antiseptic corridor

or in deserts or in downtown darkling plains

staggers through an Act that just will not end,

eyes burning with the burning of the dead.