Costumes...and directors

One thing that seems to have missed me along the theatre DNA chain of my existence is love of costume. For years I took zero interest in it, just wore whatever they gave me, and if it was good, then good, and if it was bad, I just decided to be better than my clothes ( and took careful note of the costumer for future reference/avoidance).

As the shows flew by, and enough good and bad costumes flew on and off, I came to realize that costume is a visual aid to character, and character is MY job, and that costume better serve the creation of my character as I see it (along with the director, of course)--

So, nowadays, I take a keen interest in it, and if the costumer and I differ as to what my character wears, then, sorry, but I win. It isn't about looking good, or cool, or even interesting--it's about looking right, it's about an audience member seeing me on stage and without explicitly thinking it, accepts it as right. If the audience has to think too long about whether a character would really wear something, or question why that choice has been made, or even if they think "what a really interesting costume", then they've exited the flow of the play, and the costumer have made it about themselves, and that's anathema..............................

And while I'm at it, I feel that way about directing and directors too. I've been badly directed enough over the years that I've developed a hard shell of callouses--I often boast that I'm director-proof. This doesn't mean I don't accept direction--far from it, I love getting direction when I'm an actor, I need it, and thrive on a real give and take with a good director. But I'm not a meat puppet, and I won't do something that runs counter to what I've landed on as vital to the character I'm portraying-- I'm very suspicious of flashy direction for its own sake, and sacrificing a true moment for a cool stage look.

I think a problem most theatre directors run into is the fact that the theatre director is, at best, third on the hierarchy of importance, after the play (and playwright ), and then the actor. They are confusing theatre directing with film directing, in which the director is the straw that stirs the cocktail, and the writer is usually treated as something that's stuck to the bottom of the director's shoe. (This lack of importance attached to scripts is a main reason why I decline almost every offer of film work. I'm not enough of a narcisicst that I need to see my face on film--I want to be in a good story, with true characters. And that's surprisingly rare....Not getting paid is another reason :)).

But theatre directors serve a different function than film directors, and I for one appreciate a theatre director's work if I'm not aware of it-- I love it when the elegance of blocking and scenic picture and focus of theme just seems to occur naturally on the stage. I don't want to be aware of the director when I watch a play.

Think about it-- we rarely say, I'm going to see director Mark Mann's new production--we say we are going to see, to name a recent show of mine, The Merchant of Venice, or we say, I'm going to see Amanda Phillips, or Christopher Austin, or Matt Hermes, in The Merchant of Venice, ( to name but a few members of that worthy cast). And that's how it should be! It's also why I don't like to lurk around shows I've directed. I know when I've done a decent job, and that's enough for me--I don't need the praise. I'd rather the actors got it.

The Canadian TV series Slings and Arrows, about a Stratford-like theatre festival, has a recurring character named Darren Nichols who is the archetypal humbug theatre director, from his thickly-knotted scarf ( Hey!!when did theatre people all start wearing scarves??? It must have been in the same memo that said everyone must say thank you to praise by bringing the hands together in a praying gesture, and then slightly bowing...) to his pretentious diction, and his "high concept" approaches to plays ( his production of Romeo and Juliet had the characters wearing weird chess piece costumes, while he exhorted the actors to never touch or show love).

There are a few such directors in central Ohio, many of them grad students or recently gradded students--but there are older ones as well. My pals and I will often hear out such a person's ideas, and look at each other, blinking " Darren Nichols" in Morse code. Along with "SOS".

I've actually had a director get impatient with me because I delivered a line as intended by the playwright--she actually said, " That's just a stupid playwright telling you one thing--I'm the director, telling you another." And she made cuts to the script to make the line be more about her concept.

This is what I mean when I say some stage directors think they are film directors. And this is a relatively recent film thing. In the golden days of Hollywood, films often had an "untouched by human hands" kind of feel--it was about story, and star, and not always in that order. Since then you get the director as auteur, to the point where you are never allowed to forget that Quentin Tarantino is the behind the camera of any of his films.

In my next posting, I'll sound off on what I think makes a good costumer and stage director. I know my readers will be waiting breathlessly for it. Both of them!

examples of GOOD costuming--helping to define character

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Christmas Portraits

Back around the turn of the millennium, I worked for the Kelton House Museum as their events coordinator, and on slow days I would nose around the parts of the house that weren't open to the public, snooping into the lives of a family that hadn’t lived in the house for 30 years. The house museum then was a strange amalgam of Civil War and Underground Railroad history, and decorative arts artifacts, the former honoring the original occupants of the house, who were Columbus bigwigs and abolitionists and FOHA (Friends of Honest Abe); the latter was because Grace Kelton, the last occupant to live there, was a nationally known interior decorator, and friend of everybody who was anybody.

The people who ran the house didn’t know much about the history part—they were mostly Junior Leaguers who cared more about the decorative arts side and the income potential from wedding receptions and business off-sites. I remember finding a box of very old books stuffed in a back closet, and discovering that one of them had once been owned by John Adams ( yes, the guy from the musical 1776). His book-plate was on the inside cover, and his notes and comments were written all through the book. But it had been stashed away, because, no doubt the jacket cover didn’t match the drapes of the front parlor.

Anyway, one day, when business was slow, and I didn’t feel like following my usual practice of sneaking into a museum bedroom and catching a nap on one of the 200 year old four-posters, I found a box that contained, among other things, a large scrapbook that had been put together by old Grace. It was full of notes from lifelong friends, snippets from magazines and newspapers, unlabeled locks of hair and bits of ribbons whose significance died the same day as Grace--and one remarkable series of Christmas cards.

These Christmas cards were from a single WASPy and well-tended family, and were the postcard kind, the covers of which were carefully posed group portraits. There was no name on the photos, and since Grace had taped each one securely to the pages, I couldn’t turn them over to read the message from the family, or even give a name to them. There were at least 20 of these cards…20 years of poses, of matching Christmas sweaters and and those shiny, tinsel-ridden background settings that looked like every Andy Williams Christmas special ever aired. They seemed to have begun in mid 50s, and presumably stopped with Grace’s death in the mid 70s.

The Kelton House pictures were nothing like this one...

They begin with young parents, flanking a small boy and a toddler. As the years roll by, the positioning of the parents doesn’t change, but a few more kids are added between them. The kids grow older and taller, the parents grayer and somehow smaller, and then the oldest boy’s wife appears. Within a few years there are a few more spouses, then a new baby arrives, and the family now covers a lot of ground in the photographer’s studio. A few more babies arrive, the first babies of that new generation have hair now, presumably the hair their young dads are beginning to lose. Then, a turn of the page, and suddenly the father is missing from the group. I looked long into the faces of the rest of the family, looking for some trace of sadness, some sense of absence, but these sorts of photos are not journalism--there is very little that is real about them. The smiles on the faces are just as bright as they’ve always been, just as shiny and disingenuous as the cottony snow at their feet, or the plywood sleigh at their backs.

As the pages turn, a few spouses begin to disappear from the group, replaced by new ones. Hairstyles grow long, sideburns bushy, and grandma now wears turtlenecks. Then more absence, but unlike dad’s disappearance, these new ones feel more like defections, more like the family is splitting off into smaller family groups. I imagine there’s a guy in some other house museum looking through a scrapbook full of Christmas postcards from these family splinter groups. Then, a turn of the page, and the cards stop, presumably because Grace died, and the scrapbook’s life ended with her.

I remember feeling a kind of nascent grief for the loss of the father, and for the inevitable conclusion of the lives of these people. The rest of the scrapbook was just blank pages, but I was sure I could see on them the relentless march of life, the empty spaces for the mother, for the first born sons, the inevitable transition from vitality to epilogue.

Most of the time our lives seem to flow on, and time is as imperceptible as the rotation of the earth. Great changes, like death or divorce, arrive seismically, spiking high above the normal progression of it all. But, as arranged by Grace in her lace-trimmed scrapbook, time seems to be separated from the emotion we attach to it. Time is simply a hard fact shared by us all, whether it’s shaping us by the slow wind of passing generations, or when it’s dressed up in this year’s sweater, and smiling at us from a shiny world full of tinsel and ribbon and plastic firs .

Bob Tolan

A few months back my old pal Bob Tolan passed away, and his son R.J. asked me if I'd prepare a few remarks to be read at his memorial, which was held in South Carolina ( or was it North?--ah well, you seen one Carolina, you've seen em all). Anway, here's the text of what I sent him:

 

I am very pleased to have been asked to share a few of my memories of Bob Tolan, and as I told RJ, my main concern was how to whittle it down to under three hours. But Bob was an appreciator of “economy with words”, and so I will try.

Bob Tolan

We know little of people by their stats—the accretion of credits, honors, awards, and travels all tell us what they did, but not what they were. What we are is defined by our reflection upon those whom we have encountered over the years. We all know, or have some impression of what Bob accomplished in his life, but that is one version of him, an avatar. What he was as a man, a  father, a husband and a friend, is something different, different to each of us, a kind of one to one alchemy.

To me, he was an encourager. I met him a few years after I began working in Columbus theatre, and while I had been playing leading classical roles, and was making my beginnings as a director, I harbored secret doubts as to whether I belonged in that world. I wondered where I counted as an artist. From the start, Bob considered me a colleague, and routinely tried to convince me to move to New York and try my fortunes there. He kept saying that with the qualities I possessed, I would never stop working. “ Sure, “ I’d say, “as a cab driver-- New York has plenty of those, thank you.” And he would roll his eyes in that manner I’m sure all of you would recognize. But he was the first real professional theatre man I’d ever met, who had worked on levels of the theatre world, and to have him consider me in that way was a great boost to my confidence.

He directed me in a number of shows over the few years he lived in Columbus—one in particular was produced in a converted warehouse, with no A/C, in July. During one scene, I had to sit at the edge of the raised stage, and I would pour sweat onto the legs of the people sitting right below the apron. It was a miserable experience from a physical standpoint, made bearable by the kindness Bob gave me, pulling his station wagon up in the alley behind the warehouse, with his A/C blasting, and while the audience was still applauding the end of the first act, I would run through the curtain, past the other actors backstage, through the backdoor, and into his car, for 15 minutes of blessed cold air. He always had a soft drink for me as well. He did this every night of the run. He never came in the theatre. He just knew when intermission was ready to begin. After that, I would have done anything for him. I was the lion, and he was the man who’d pulled the thorn from my paw.

I will close with an unintended practical joke I played on him. I had founded a small theatre company, and in its early days, nearly all the jobs of the production were done by me, and a few others. We didn’t want it to look like a “kitchen table operation”—one of Bob’s phrases—so we made up fake company members, so it would look like we had a large group. In those days I would do the costuming myself, which was mostly just renting or borrowing from other theatres or costume houses. Since I was also directing, I made up the name “ Edith Kneck” for the costume designer, a play on Hollywood’s legendary Edith Head. In time, Edith even started to get favorable reviews in the papers. She costumed all our shows for the first season.

One day Bob called me and asked for Edith’s number. He said he’d seen one of our shows and was impressed by her design, and wanted to hire her for a show he was producing. I was stunned for a moment—for a little while there I considered seeing how long I could stretch this out—“ Edith said she’s heard about your tyrannical nature and refuses to work with such a mean guy”—but I finally just said,”Bob….I’m Edith….Edith Kneck?…you know, Edith Head…?” He was quiet for a very long moment, then shouted, “ Oh Jesus Christ!” and hung up on me. He called back a little later and called me a few choice names, then hung up again.

As a postscript, I knew Edith’s days were numbered now that she’d been outed. So by the 2^nd season, when we could afford a real costumer, I killed her off. We put a table in the lobby, draped in black, with an “in memoriam” display of her designs. I explained she been killed in a sewing machine accident. A second postscript: one of the local papers gave her a brief obit on the arts page. Bob gave me a copy of it.

John Updike once said the deaths of distant friends carry us off, bit by bit, and he’s right. I’ll never again be that alchemy of Bob/Mark, just as all of you have lost the alchemy of Bob/You. He’s taken that with him to the next place. And like alchemy, the math doesn’t add up—he was a large man, and took up a large space in our hearts, and yet the world he left behind to us is a much smaller one.

Point of Order

When Senator Ted Cruz first came to my notice, I thought he looked familiar. When I heard him speak, I thought his "ideas" sounded familiar --now I get it...

Good Dog

Sonny, his last weekend 2013

Sonny smelling the flowers, 2004

I have been walking shadowless through the house these last four days. I have cried my 54 year old self to sleep every night…

I keep finding the empty places he left behind—under my desk, where, when thunder rolled up from across Alkire Lake, he would carry his toys and curl trembling at my feet…

Stretched out on the floor behind me as I cooked at the stove, where he lay in wait in the sure knowledge that something tasty would fall from the pan…

On the couch where he would kick off the throw pillows and curl up, watching to see if I needed him, till he dozed off…

The arm of my chair, where he would come to rest his chin and serenade me with the most unique melody of groans, rumbles, whines, and wheedles when he thought he wasn’t getting enough attention, which was always…

The backyard and the field beyond, where some of his toys still lay, because I haven’t the heart to throw them away yet…

At the front door as I entered, with that powerful wagging tail that swept over everything in its range, a welcome gift carried gently in that soft mouth because he was a good host ( the gift was whatever was handy—shoes, bones, teddy bears, even a live kitten once)…

At the back door, which he would swat whenever it was time to go outside, and which bears the marks of his claws…

Our bed, where in his last weeks he would gather his waning strength to jump up, and burrow in between us, his exhausted head laying heavily on my chest…

Sonny was an eternal puppy all his ten years, excited to get in on anything good we might be doing. He aspired to nothing more than to live in the land of Good Dog, where praise and snacks rained like manna, and on those occasions when he crossed into the dark frontiers of Bad Dog, he didn’t stay there long. His ears and tail would droop, and then, thanks to a short term memory equal to any goldfish, they would rise again, and that smiling face with the famous, serene  Golden Retriever eyes would tell us all was forgiven, even if we hadn’t forgiven him yet.

He was game and handsome and strong. We took him to a swimming lake once, where he made friends with all the kids along the beach, and let them hang onto his back as he tugged them through the water . He loved teasing our old terrier Pepper when they were outside, playfully nipping at her butt to get a rise out of her. He would wait by the deck for her to come running back to the house, then block her path till she eventually learned to walk back slow and indifferent, denying him the fun of impeding her progress. After Pepper died, and our new terrier came to the house, the roles became reversed—she would wait for him to run back, and he too learned to walk slowly, so as not to trigger her terrier response to swift motion.

His appetite was prodigious, and he was an incorrigible counter-surfer and while we might occasionally forget we’d left something on the kitchen counters, he never did. We kept a tally called Sonny’s Scarf List, of all the things he’d stolen and eaten—whole pies, pizzas, loaves of bread, pots of stew, and then there were the non-food items: four wristwatches with metal bands, ear buds, binder clips, plastic ground beef wrappers with metal tips—the list went on. Everything passed too, in large land mines of poop on the back field, that made him the anathema of all our neighbors who liked to stroll along the lake.

He was hell on four legs his first three years—no one told us Goldens are the slowest to mature of all dogs. We learned by trial and error—actually, error and more error, but we grew up together, and his last six years he was the dog we’d dreamed he be. A personality bigger than either of ours, an endless capacity for affection, mostly obedient, always entertaining. Beloved of all our cats, who napped with him, and groomed him, even as he’s steal their food and catnip toys. Our tabby Max, who was Sonny’s self-appointed toadie, has spent a lot of time looking out the backdoor these last few days, meowing, as he always did when Sonny went out. In Max’s world, if Sonny isn’t in the house, he’s in the backyard, though unseen now. Max always stood at the door meowing until we let Sonny back in.

A combination of a massive blood tumor the size of a cabbage on the left side of his neck, and a bad heart arrhythmia took him down.  The vet had never seen anything like it. The weight of the tumor wouldn’t let him lift his head at the end. He had no pain, but was so exhausted we knew the time had come. On the final day we had to lift him onto a Radio Flyer wagon to wheel him to the car. When we got to the vet’s office, he got out of the car on his own steam and walked unsteadily to the back examining room, wagging his tail. He was too heavy to lift onto the table, so we lay him on the floor, and got down with him, stroking him and assuring him he was forever in the land of Good Dog. The vet came in and administered a sedative, and as he drifted off, his head in Dani’s lap, I got down to his face and kept whispering what a good boy he was. His eyes opened and he draped his paw on my arm, as he’d done so often over the years, and drifted off again. The vet then injected the final drug, and then, astonishingly, he lifted his head and licked my face, and was gone. It was his last gift.

It was a gift to go with all the other gifts he’d given us over the last decade. He was not a child, he was a pet—I would never presume to compare the loss of a dog to the loss of a child—but I have grieved, and am grieving, as much as I ever have in my life. I’d like to think Dani and I gave him a good life, and what he gave in return is best measured by the empty spaces he leaves behind.

Rituals and Effigies

 Every so often, I inflict some of my poetry on the innocent public--this is one of those times...from a chapbook I made once, entitled Rituals and Effigies... (note: the Chinese poems are free translations--the raw translation from the originals are in italics, and what I made of them follows below it)

RITUALS

 AND

 EFFIGIES

BY

Mark Mann

 Child Jesse

The earth is only lent

so my grandfather Jesse took it

into his lungs his skin his eyes

years miles below the tipple

buried in the great Maryland seam

until, more earth than man,

he began to give it back

black spittle black blood black tears

until the earth could say

child Jesse, let us begin again.

Childless

This fantasy     this collection of names

inspection tours of suitable colleges

these unopened albums       your very own key,

goodbye                       every new poem

your face         their swift hands

so very like mine

love as an involuntary signal

sent up into the long dark

tracing the empty sectors     the journal entries

addressed to the diminishing image

the fiftieth birthday arriving

like a goodbye      the mirror of a father

H3O                    the terrible rise of time

the golem in the living temple

so breathtaking this dark     so unlike a dark

so long     astonishing

Two Wheels

It’s a common tale, but this is how I remember mine:

I was six, maybe, and on my blue bike

at last without training wheels, and my father

held onto the back of the seat and pushed

promising, “ I won’t let go”

and down the alley we flew, getting faster,

getting better, and I told him

right there I loved him, that this

was the beginning of my life,

that when he was old I would return the favor,

that I understood him better than he ever knew,

that the truest moments live in the future,

that everything was practice for everything else,

and when I looked back he was so far

away I could hardly see him.

Traveling South

After Meng Haoran

Tree shed goose south cross

North wind river on cold

My home Xiang water bend

Far distance Chu cloud edge

Home tears travel in exhausted

Solitary sail sky edge watch

Lost ferry wish have ask

Level sea dusk wide

The trees have lost their gold to the southbound geese

The winds have frozen all the rivers north of here

My home at Xiang sits at the river’s mouth

So far south from Chu it crosses the border of the clouds.

Thinking how weary I am, how far from home, I cry

As, in the distance, a single sail cuts along the sky’s edge, and disappears.

I am lost-- too late to ask when the next ferry comes.

This sea is so quiet, so cold. This dark, so wide.

1978

As if you were 16 again, and I was 18,

and the sky was younger too, and the grass a lighter green,

and the summer longer, and sweeter, and slower and

the water was clearer as it tried to climb the sand

at Lake Logan, when we lied to our parents about something to do

with school, and took my mother’s car and filled it with our whole crew

and spent that entire day skin to shivering skin-- no, it must have been May

and too early to be wearing so little but you were 16 and I, 18, let’s say,

and your lips were numb you said, and I remember thinking they looked blue,

but we were young, and suffering for love was all we knew how to do. 

ARS POETICA

Poetry I

I like my poetry

underwater,

bending the light,

carrying new sound

to all my hidden creatures.

I want it to drift back to the moon,

down to the cold.

I want it to rise, amniotic and slow,

the litany of sky, tree, lake,

you, me, you.

Poetry II

If you are a traffic cop, the noise

you once heard when you were nine, coming

from your parent’s bedroom.

                                                If you are an uncle,

all the silences throughout the house.

                                                                          If you

play the piano or skin rabbits,

love the word “metastasize” 

in your mouth, outside in the snow

running with the neighbor’s adopted Chinese.

It will follow your wife to the elevator,

your mother to her grave, the Dutch elm

to certain valleys in West Virginia.

If you are busy becoming your father

around each corner, covets your loose change,

follows you home, a diseased stray,

a furious child.  The desert of your life.

Ghost Villanelle

Father, smoke and moon and glass

Arrangement in the barrows of

Some future boon that I will ask:

Your reasons for your wicked past

Your long reach for the smoke of love

Oh, father (and smoke and moon and glass)

Believe me and you’ll see how fast

The lies the moonlit patterns wove

Into this future boon I’ll ask

Will give your sons this ghostly cast

This need to learn the need that drove

This father of smoke and moon and glass

We rise, your sons, and turn at last

To look into the eyes that prove

There is no future boon we’d ask

That, granted, would repair the past.

We offer this imperfect love,

My father, my smoke, my moon, my glass

This boon, this light, this need to ask.

Red Wheelbarrow, Revisited

For every dependable

                            red wheelbarrow

          there must be one

         that cracked under the glaze

                 of the constant rain,

               and the many complaints

of those relentless white chickens

Dreaming of the Queen

after a study that revealed each night

 one-third of the people in England

dream of their queen

For some of us, Elizabeth II of England is a saucy minx

in fishnet hosiery, a bright red slash of a smile

on a face curiously knowing, as she reclines on a magnificent

rug made entirely of Pembroke Welsh corgi pelts.

Other nights, she is the friendly widowed neighbor,

the comfortable one the police bring along

to help carry the news your son has been killed by Arabs.

Yet, even though the part of you that’s always awake

knows you have never had a legitimate son

the fact that Elizabeth II of England occupies the next flat

but one doesn’t violate your dream-logic, and as you close

the door on the grateful policeman, you accept her kind offer

of tea and bickies, which she produces from her handbag,

and pours with immaculate, expert hands.

Each evening, the great shadow stretches over all of England,

and one-third of us, over twenty million sleeping souls, discover

her cleaning our bedrooms, repairing our cars, on the floor

of our nursery schoolrooms, playing with the flop-eared

class bunny named Charles. Sometimes we catch sight of her

running on the pitch at test matches, or riding in a pumpkin carriage

along a Dublin back lane, oblivious to the unblinking eyes in the windows.

More often in recent years, she dies in our guest rooms,

surrounded by her family, and our uncle Ted, who pats her hand

until the death rattle subsides.

How exhausted she must be! Each morning, returning to her corgis,

weary from a night of answering prayers, or ruining them.

She has a wash, poached eggs while reading her correspondence,

and then it’s out into the bright day and the official opening of a new factory,

trying not to think about the evening’s work that lay ahead of her.

Trying to smile as she waves to her cheering people.

Trying not to notice the wink of recognition from one-third of them.

Sacrifice to the Cat that Scared all the Rats 


After Mei Yaochen

Self have 5 white cat

Rat not invade my books

Today morning 5 white die

Sacrifice with rice and fish

See off it at middle river

Incantation you not you neglect

Before you bite one rat

Hold in mouth cry around yard remove

Want cause crowd rat frightened

Thought will clear my cottage

From board boat come

Boat in together room live

Dry grain although its thin

Evade eat drip steal from

This real you have industriousness

Have industriousness surpass chicken pig

Ordinary person stress spur horse drive

Say not like horse donkey

Already finish not again discuss

For you somewhat cry

When we lived together, my cat with five white spots,

The rats never touched my books

This morning, old friend, you died

From the boat I offered a sacrifice of rice and fish

And set you off from the middle of the river

Then I chanted for you, Five White, in remembrance

Of the day you caught a large rat

And carried it crying around our yard

To warn the riot of other rats to stay away

From our clean little cottage

When we had to come and live on this boat

and share this small room

with its thin but dry store of grain

I never worried about rat foulness or theft

because you were always on patrol.

Some say the chicken or the pig works harder.

Some people swear by their horses or donkeys.

I don’t argue with them today.

I cry for you a little, today.

Summer Ends at Alkire Lake/South American Coup d’etat


More often these mornings, we wake as if in mid-tango,
legs hooked, your arm traveling the length of mine,
Your morning breath west, mine east.

Autumn arrives by dark in mid-September. It cuts off
the root speech of the rose garden, creeps behind the mist
of the lake, calls to action the geese murmuring in the reeds.

It's anthem, swelling the curtains of our bedroom,
summons the sleepers to rise. The new season, its uniform
festooned with victory, waves from our balcony.

Skull Island

When the sailors drugged Kong and shipped him off to star on Broadway,

the natives of Skull Island, after an initial demonstration of grief,

got down to the business of creating a new god. 

At first they tried worshipping some of the giant lizards

of the island, but always they remembered how easily

Kong had defeated them, and soon attendance at the weekly services

dwindled to dangerous lows.

Next they considered the white adventurers who’d taken Kong, but gods

who supplant other gods and then leave are not reliable. Who next?

For a moment, the local shaman seemed up to the job,

but there wasn’t a man or woman or child among them

who had not seen him, from time to time, eat too much poi.

For a long period they worshipped nothing. They rose each morning

and looked to the empty altar beside the enormous gate,

and to the silent green mountain beyond that—the thanks they gave

for each new day’s bounty was received only by the indifferent sea air

and certain impious prehistoric birds. Weddings became joyless

rituals of financial alliance , and the lighting of funeral pyres

allowed the natives to rid their huts of the clutter of old Kong effigies.

That is all anyone knows for sure. I’m told they flirted, for a brief time,

with certain Hollywood religions—some left the island

and returned with tales of storefront mysticism, in lands ruled by invisible gods,

which made the wisest of them smile—for what can replace the certainty of a thousand drumbeats, and the redemption of witnessing your god rise from his lair

in the far sea cliffs, and the awe of his approach, and all of this ecstasy  purchased

with the simple gift of a stolen virgin in bottle-yellow hair?

Though You Said You Would Come

After Li Shangyin

Come be empty word go without trace

Moon slant tower on fifth watch bell

Dream be far part call hard call

Write reason hurry achieve ink not thick

Candle shine half cover gold emerald

Musk vapour tiny degree embroider lotus

Liu young already regret Peng shan far

More separate Peng shan ten thousand times

Though you said you would come tonight you are not here

The moon slants past the bell tower as it sounds the fifth watch

Better to sleep and dream you are too far to call

And believe the ink is too thin for me to write

But the candles bring life to my gold and emerald covers

Your perfume lingers on the lotus embroidery

Already I regret knowing how far the nearest Pengshan hill sits,

Knowing you must be ten thousand Pengshan hills away.