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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=346192" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Peripeteia</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Of course, the familiar rustling of programs, <br>My hair mussed from behind by a grand gesture <br>Of mink. A little craning about to see <br>If anyone I know is in the audience, <br>And, as the house fills up, <br>A mild relief that no one there knows me. <br>A certain amount of getting up and down <br>From my aisle seat to let the others in. <br>Then my eyes wander briefly over the cast, <br>Management, stand-ins, make-up men, designers, <br>Perfume and liquor ads, and rise prayerlike <br>To the false heaven of rosetted lights, <br>The stucco lyres and emblems of high art <br>That promise, with crude Broadway honesty, <br>Something less than perfection: <br>Two bulbs are missing and Apollo’s bored. </div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>And then the cool, drawn-out anticipation, <br>Not of the play itself, but the false dusk <br>And equally false night when the houselights <br>Obey some planetary rheostat <br>And bring a stillness on. It is that stillness <br>I wait for. <br>Before it comes, <br>Whether we like it or not, we are a crowd, <br>Foul-breathed, gum-chewing, fat with arrogance, <br>Passion, opinion, and appetite for blood. <br>But in that instant, which the mind protracts, <br>From dim to dark before the curtain rises, <br>Each of us is miraculously alone <br>In calm, invulnerable isolation, <br>Neither a neighbor nor a fellow but, <br>As at the beginning and end, a single soul, <br>With all the sweet and sour of loneliness. <br>I, as a connoisseur of loneliness, <br>Savor it richly, and set it down <br>In an endless umber landscape, a stubble field <br>Under a lilac, electric, storm-flushed sky, <br>Where, in companionship with worthless stones, <br>Mica-flecked, or at best some rusty quartz, <br>I stood in childhood, waiting for things to mend. <br>A useful discipline, perhaps. One that might lead <br>To solitary, self-denying work <br>That issues in something harmless, like a poem, <br>Governed by laws that stand for other laws, <br>Both of which aim, through kindred disciplines, <br>At the soul’s knowledge and habiliment. <br>In any case, in a self-granted freedom, <br>The mind, lone regent of itself, prolongs <br>The dark and silence; mirrors itself, delights <br>In consciousness of consciousness, alone, <br>Sufficient, nimble, touched with a small grace. </div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>Then, as it must at last, the curtain rises, <br>The play begins. Something by Shakespeare. <br>Framed in the arched proscenium, it seems <br>A dream, neither better nor worse <br>Than whatever I shall dream after I rise <br>With hat and coat, go home to bed, and dream. <br>If anything, more limited, more strict— <br>No one will fly or turn into a moose. <br>But acceptable, like a dream, because remote, <br>And there is, after all, a pretty girl. <br>Perhaps tonight she’ll figure in the cast <br>I summon to my slumber and control <br>In vast arenas, limitless space, and time <br>That yield and sway in soft Einsteinian tides. <br>Who is she? Sylvia? Amelia Earhart? <br>Some creature that appears and disappears <br>From life, from reverie, a fugitive of dreams? <br>There on the stage, with awkward grace, the actors, <br>Beautifully costumed in Renaissance brocade, <br>Perform their duties, even as I must mine, <br>Though not, as I am, always free to smile. </div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>Something is happening. Some consternation. <br>Are the knives out? Is someone’s life in danger? <br>And can the magic cloak and book protect? <br>One has, of course, real confidence in Shakespeare. <br>And I relax in my plush seat, convinced <br>That prompt as dawn and genuine as a toothache <br>The dream will be accomplished, provisionally true <br>As anything else one cares to think about. <br>The players are aghast. Can it be the villain, <br>The outrageous drunks, plotting the coup d’état, <br>Are slyer than we thought? Or we more innocent? <br>Can it be that poems lie? As in a dream, <br>Leaving a stunned and gap-mouthed Ferdinand, <br>Father and faery pageant, she, even she, <br>Miraculous Miranda, steps from the stage, <br>Moves up the aisle to my seat, where she stops, <br>Smiles gently, seriously, and takes my hand <br>And leads me out of the theatre, into a night <br>As luminous as noon, more deeply real, <br>Simply because of her hand, than any dream <br>Shakespeare or I or anyone ever dreamed.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Anthony+Evan+Hecht">Anthony Evan Hecht</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=346192" data-title="Peripeteia de Anthony Evan Hecht" data-description="Of course, the familiar rustling of programs, 
My hair mussed from behind by a grand gesture 
Of mink. A little craning about to see 
If anyone I know is in the audience, 
And, as the house fills up, 
A mild relief that no one there knows me. 
A c..."></div>
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