Matinee
 
The cast has taken its bows
The curtain has dropped in all its
Red velvet luxury
Stage hands start to sweep the stage
And grips trundle scenery away in exchange
For act one’s set tonight
 
The sound and light board has nothing to say now
But house lights are coming up
It’s up to the audience
To find its way out in the world
 
Some serious drama goes on nightly here
The labored pen scratchings of a sensitive soul
(Playwrights are always sensitive)
 
This was no rally or caucus
No platform here
Ideas are concealed in subtext, a bit of blocking, the dimming of a spotlight
Big ideas…change—the—world type ideas
The ones that kept the playwright up at night staring at
Her canary in its cage
When she might have been dreaming of holding a Tony
 
Dramaturges will one day put this work in perspective
On how it commented on the times
The way, say, Miller’s Crucible once made HUAC groan
Or Tartuffe made some clergy loosen their ruffled collars
 
Ushers now throw open big brass doors
For the audience to escape to the sidewalk
Where a twisted pretzel vendor waits for his prey
And two brokers exchange ideas in heated fashion
While a siren orates about some terrible drama
 
Audience now crosses the membrane from playhouse to agora
Maybe to squint uncomfortably at the blinding light
Or maybe, just maybe, reverse the dimmer switch
 




If I'd Never Left San Francisco
By (Robert Frost?)


If I'd stayed in the Golden Gate
Golden dust dreams would not abate
For white clapboards I would exchange
Victorian gewgaws’ frilly range
 
Snow would turn all its downy flakes
Into fog the Redwood belt makes
And mending walls need not be done
With trusting friends easily won
 
Apple time with impending sleep
Wanes for grapes in Sonoma’s reap
Tramps never fear the time of mud
Where birds of paradise always bud
 
Whose woods these are I think I know
To all in Golden Gate Park we owe
One could do worse than swing on birches
Find the boyhood for which he searches
 
Blow in with Lowell Neighbor Kerouac
Syncopate Bebop to set Derry back
Not scare myself with my desert places
On cable cars find joyous faces
 
Acquaintance with the night is telling doom
I prefer a Nob Hill sunny room
The bridge would lap across the bay
Surely something gold can stay
 
 



Bridge of Sighs
 
The condemned once paused here
Between the Hells of inquisition
In the old prison and years of
The silent treatment in the new prison
But spanning the Rio di Palazzo, and fate…
Was the bridge
 
Sad and angry faces carved in limestone
Announce like Baroque emoticons
How we should feel
Though the gondoliers underneath get it
By the lapping of the fetid water
Roiling over antique cries, refusing to let go
 
Story goes: upon crossing it to months or years of solitude
—Courtesy the almighty Doge— 
The wretched would gaze out two lattice—grilled windows
As if the Doge begrudged them a full view
And, upon seeing their beloved Venezia for the last time
Would speak the only words fitting such an occasion:
Aahh
 
Casanova — never one for loss of a romantic line --
Could only utter that suspiration
For his sentence
 
Others, too, captured for great crimes around the canals
Purse—snatching, and card—sharping, and pilfering sweetmeats
To live the days without light, or freedom, or romance,
Or the rocking of the water
 
Now, if lovers, so they say; pass under by gondola at sunset
They will enjoy eternal love
 
Here’s one now — replete with soul mate
The man — just timing that perfect kiss
And at this moment the ghost of one miscreant begins to cross
He pauses
There his beloved city, floating impossibly over the mud flats
Breathtaking beauty against decay 
 
He inhales the canals into his empty chambers
While below the present day Casanova inhales for his kiss
Just now the gondolier is meeting the arch
Lips touch below
Lips part above
And…
 
Aahh