Mutoscope

Swirl and smash of waves against the legs

and crossgirders of the pier, I have come to Brighton,

come as the fathers of our fathers came,

to see the past’s Peep Show.

On two good legs, on one, they came,

veterans and stay-at-homes of the Great War,

all casualties, to stroll the West Pier’s promenade,

past bands, flags, and minstrel shows,

past Gladys Pawsey in a high-necked bathing costume

riding her bicycle off the high board,

past Hokey-Pokey and Electric Shocker,

to the old Penny Palace, pennies burning hotly

in their hands, the worn watery profile

of Queen Victoria looking away from it all.

I bend to the mutoscope’s lit window

to see “What the Butler Saw”: a woman artlessly

taking off her clothes in a jerky striptease

I can slow down or speed up

by turning the handle of the mutoscope.

Easily I raise her from darkness—

the eye eternally aroused by what it can’t touch—

to watch her brief repeating performance

that counts for so little. Or so much.

I can’t be sure which.

Abruptly, THE END shuts down the image, but her story

continues as she reverses time’s tawdry sequence

to dress and quickly disappear

down a maze of narrow streets and alleys

filled with the ghostly bodies and bodiless ghosts

of causality, the unredeemed and never-to-be-born

bearing her along to a flight

of shabby stairs, a rented room where she is free

as anyone to dream her dreams and smoke a cigarette,

smoke from the lit tip spiraling

in patternless patterns toward the room’s bare light bulb,

the light I see her by harsh, violently

unforgiving, as she makes tomorrow into a question

of either/or: to leave this room, this vacancy

forever, or go on exactly as she has before.

Old ghost, your history is nameless and sexual,

you are your own enigma, victim

or heroine of an act of repetition that, once chosen,

will choose you for a lifetime.

I peer into the tunneled past,

so small, so faraway and fragmentary,

and yet, not unconnected to what I am now.

Dilapidation upon dilapidation, Brighton

is crumbling, fading to sepia tones,

as your unfunny burlesque continues past

your life, perhaps past mine,

the past preserved and persevering,

the sentimental past.

Source: Annonciade (1989)