February 2022
Dennis Barone
dbarone@usj.edu
Editor's Note: I invited Dennis to submit poems for the February issue at the suggestion of Michael Gessner, one of our contributing editors. He responded with these prose poems which I think you will enjoy.

Off-Balance

     It is a narcotic, the acting line. Consider the actor’s notebook: its contemporized antiquity; its automated egoism. The actor’s children have two arms and two legs but are scolded by those with pointed stinger, and by tusk they have been shoved off school grounds. The actor’s rage carries all the import of an unravelling past and a quickening plot. On the boards, phones are denied. We read about a certain originality of expression, peppered with political debate. The New York Times offers an occasional column. The actor learns to sing and dance as well as to act. All this trouble and still no change – another ambulance passes in the night. Thy will be done, the actor prays, before ordering wine. Consider the hotels actors occupy. Act three had some to an end in violent storm, trees shaking. A sanctuary of one sort or another would be called for – a place to ice old wounds, belly-up to the bar and order drinks all around, a pianist off to one side plunking out old show tunes. The bucket brigade stumbles down the steep stairs locked arm-in-arm singing, “There’s a hole in the bucket. Go mend it!” Such times as these cannot be easily forgotten. The company’s official photographer snaps an impromptu photo of the boisterous gathering. Next consider the element of surprise in a stage production, that unexpected turn that comes in the final twenty minutes, and what a time the audience has of it, guessing, anticipating how the merry couple will meet their inexorable fate – grace or shame, tragedy or comedy. An actor must be a ballerina, prepared to rise on toe one moment and decline as the dead swan in the next act and to do so with good cheer and that sort of professionalism union rules require. Trust us, we know. We have been there on-stage for the premier of The Return of the Soldier. When the audience clapped, we bowed for the better part of an hour.


The Orb of Prague

     It is true that on the evening of Monday the twentieth my initial reaction had been one of total disbelief. We still had the dim light of Indian summer and what I thought was another reason for short, dark days. The bronze-age began that morning, a morning that made faces visible to words: dry words, dead words. Ask him to hear some other sound – a pelican too grim for salvation and those problems without dollars. Rain fell with bits of sky, a weather that felt like disaster. Rain begged too many questions. An afternoon apart and then something after little drops. When I stood there that Monday, off in a giggle, the most terrible things came back to the hapless author. A child in New Haven had ignored eternity. Such thoughtlessness surprised me and the clouds expanded and darkened. Each of us slept in his cloak. For once we could not find wherewithal to employ our pencils. We refused to leave the house: its old bricks bear the marks of fingers that shaped them. The sound of the wind through our masks became an anthem. And when we found him that Monday, he did his chin-ups on the edge of the crater, a glass object by his side. This, he said, becomes the light, the quiet, the sound of birds. I do not want to repeat the catastrophe of last year: an unpleasant scene in the town square, followed by a walk without direction. The heart will never give up this promise of truth. Even wilderness makes light kingdom.


The Gift

     Alice wanted to recline in the sun but since she wrenched her neck earlier that week she first pushed some sand into a mound upon which to rest her head. In the early morning light this heap of sand had a reddish tint that picked-up the color of her two-piece suit. “This will do very nicely, indeed,” she said to air and water and breeze for there was no one to hear her at such an early hour, not a surfer or fisherman. She reclined and sighed deeply, “Ah,” and just then as she stretched out on her terry beach towel her right foot hit a hard surface. She grabbed her foot and saw that her pedicure had been ruined and she determined to discover this awful object and hurl it through space into the deep of the sea. She leaned forward, grabbed it, brought it toward her face, and contemplated it. The orb-like object had a milky translucence and within it there appeared a separate and different object, suspended – perhaps a moon rock, she thought. She found it impossible to hurl this artifact ocean-ward and instead turned it in her hands and contemplated it some more. Then the pincers of a sand-crab struck her left foot and Alice reacted in lightning speed, smashed the creature to a pancake with her moon-rock orb. She then pulled her phone from her bag, called Nail-Pro and made an appointment for a new pedicure that afternoon. Then she eased back down – slowly because of her sore neck – rested her head on the pillow of sand, her moon-rock orb her only company.
©2022 Dennis Barone
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to say what it is about the poem you like. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -JL