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LOOK,
GRIEF, ALIVE
Its
rôle, iniquitous in the dark scene’s rear,
cracking
the capsule of suggestion there
that
the creaking aisles should be drowned in gas;
or
paging the boards with messages
in
crevice tucked, come across, read,
how
one might scuttle pit, parapet,
was
good enough career for any grief.
Failed
to scuttle, though did scuttle clear
marks
in the fibres that would last some years,
discomfiting
the unshared night
in
which the cockpit huddled tight,
empty,
alone, slumped, an old theatre
where
every nervous timber heard
that
grief still pacing with its ghastly gags.
Leaving
such trace, would have been glad, the grief,
to
be remembered as a might-have-been
and
leave the crock it canted in so long.
It
turned out then as not quite thought upon
that
it found a mirrored room with naked lights
and
lasting meats set for it, like
that
tragic evening it first got the part.
But
grief is unintelligent; once fed
a
little worried tissue, bloody or dead,
it
would assign no greater curious value
to
its keeper’s kindly lodging and his pail
than
an impounded jackal. Still it was fed. The frame
that
had against incitement kept its phlegm
had
other plans than letting a grief fade.
No
sinister (not that the barb would know)
intention
to lap it in musk-vapoured wool,
to
keep the horny insect in safe down,
was
in the hulk, who just wished not to own
some
played-out relic with a softened brain,
pampered
in glad-rags that no longer pained,
or
bedded in nostalgic first-night bills.
This
coliseum with the split sides, this
house
near-broken, considered it a vice
that
the ham agent provocateur who filled
the
hall with tears should be sized down and stilled
in
ethanol of reminiscences.
It
would have been sadistic to depress
the
player who put character in these walls.
So,
kept in chafing-trim as it began,
this
sable villain-Pierrot was kept on.
The
unglazed hack must play, replay the part
it
had invented, the hissed ‘Not to be’, the alert
fiend,
who after its hot tongs’ labour could drink up
adrenaline’s
grog at leisure, so the house, bankrupt,
could
contemplate its cause and know its art.
Alan
Marshfield
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