Ovation
I try to make myself afraid,
the way you must have been afraid,
stepping out onto this stage—
but with a fear so pure, so
perfectly informed that you strode
out shouting. Here, where
the neon yellow arrows painted
on the floor shoot forward underfoot
in blackness—beneath the hanging
sequence of tinted skies—out toward
that mindless immortalizing light, now
dark. Now I think I feel the heat you
must have felt rising from the front rows.
A gaping fire door, a furnace:
your single body standing here
with no shadow, swinging on itself.
Had you been a fool, you might have thought
that they loved you. They never love you,
you said. They are hungry for the god
in his gold eclipse, the pure you on fire.
John and I move quickly, each with a handful
of ash, scattering. The sound of no sound falling
into the cracks in the boards, the footlights,
the first row. A small personal snow: a prince
of dust, a villain of dust. Each part you played
drifting up again, recomposing. I open my hand,
I let you go—back into the lines you learned,
back into the body and the body's beauty—
back into the standing ovation: bow after bow after bow.
Copyright Credit: Carol Muske-Dukes, “Ovation” from Sparrow. Copyright © 2003 by Carol Muske-Dukes. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Source: Sparrow: Poems (Random House Inc., 2003)