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THE
ART OF DECEPTION
Script writers,
movie directors, have their manual of tricks
for eliciting tears.
His beautiful face, the halt in her eyes,
neither one hearing
or needing to hear, their first gaze like this.
Or love outlingering
death. A pain we know or
can guess.
The
grief a delta of brooks on a telegram.
The
pain we have now pays for the happiness then.
They
know, the conjuring composers, how to dig chords
into
our nerves. Trumpets,
violins, hallelujahs, refer
our
ecstasies to the transcendental. Agnus
dei,
Dies
irae, Kyrie eleison. Jungle
and ocean noises
moan
in night cities to defer the silence.
Perplexity
orders into a passionate wonder.
They
know how it’s done, the poets, configuring verbs
to
bear the unbearable of the discrete unknown.
The
phoenix drowns in longevity of blood.
Ectoplasms
leave stains on the palimpsest.
Nerves
are resolved in a contradiction of clues.
Names
with no meaning describe the unnameable.
Painters
know too well how light and sight deceive us.
They
mark a plane, dandle us into perspective,
butchering
a body, botching a reconstitution;
making
illusion real. They give us
the feel,
with blood and dung,
of a yellow roadway through
the thorny scrub of
fen farms and Dutch drink dens.
From the primal
feud, from the epitomes of love
in the Family Saga,
novelists and playwrights outline
the graphs of
sacrifice, of occasions, ambitions,
condensing extremes,
the wiggy manner of ballrooms,
unconscious
charades, unmotivated betrayals;—
flattering us with
suspense, pretending catharsis.
Before the fiddlers
have fled, and in the little time left
before they ask us
to pay the bill, (though we know we are tricked,
unsatisfied, high
and dry, as if trying to recall
the best thought we
ever had but did not write down),
we always
stay—through the cabaret act, among mirrors—
for dawn to freshen
the party, for something to
matter.
Alan
Marshfield
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