The Last Scene
Extravagant sweep
of clear sky
darkening
in the big picture window
beside the bed,
lights here and there
already flashing all
across the city down below us—
Ellen
and the girls out somewhere,
you and I alone,
you with your eyes closed,
I with a drink in hand:
you suddenly in character,
your voice
a wraith’s voice,
faint, stumbling,
slurry
with morphine,
and yet
still artful
as ever,
even if the art
was obvious,
the dying brother
playing the dying brother—
Do you think
you have a problem
with that?
the question
masking a declaration,
the brother
a savior,
the savior a judge,
not all that different from
before except that now
the dying had
distilled
all doubt away
as you repeated,
Do you think
you have a
problem?
“Me? With what?”
I too in character now,
the character
without character,
the little brother who
in your mind proves
the truth
of all you think
by his resistance to it,
pulling
the scene off
by refusing to play it,
pretending not to know:
“With what?”
With that,
head tilted to the shot
glass,
“This?”
my one desire now
a little shtick,
a final moment
of material—
“This?
A problem?
Not at all.
There’s plenty more
where that came from,
almost a whole bottle.”
You imperturbable,
Look at yourself,
how you sit here
drinking all alone.
“Well, mea
gulpa.
Are you happy now?”
You drink
a lot.
“I have a lot
to drink about.”
And that was that.
For now you drifted off,
or seemed to,
your eyes closed,
head turned away,
the two of us
together
for the last
time ever on the stage
of being brothers,
our see-through
figures in the picture window
spectral and vast
against the city
flashing
a ghostly circuitry
of nerves
within
the ancient masks we wore,
the hand I lifted,
the drink I knocked back
in a final toast
in honor of the timing,
the concentration
that neither
one of us
could ever break.
Copyright Credit: Alan Shapiro, “The Last Scene” from Song and Dance. Copyright © 2002 by Alan Shapiro. Reprinted with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved, www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.
Source: Song and Dance (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002)