Your fingers skate a smooth camber
up the model iron thigh you paid for,
that faded bottle-gloss and particular fit.
You travel the waist that glides constant
to its scooping plateau at mid-torso, and
graze the imprinted signet—MagiCo—
covering the switch that activates her
horror for the stage routine and show.
All you had to know was how to dress them;
because the manual was technical and long you
only mastered how to turn them off and how
to turn them on; they satisfy a common use,
dumbfounding crowds in the theater dark
and furnishing your living room as monument,
as accidental art, and at your touch they start
to creak and swim—you must have turned
them on, and now a nasty part of you wants
to disassemble them, sprain them both apart:
first stripping the truss and snare,
pouring out the bearings there and
slashing, like stems, the jumpers
to see what makes her joints
thrust and tread the air, oh,
tawny pair, twisted pair,
straddling the stand,
jerk, malfunction, X-X-X,
insubstantial shift;
thrashing. You pity
their stilt-stagger gait,
the authentic metal weight.
Where is she going? To start—
inspecting her reveals the ugly parts:
joint scuffing, oil fog, bowing installation,
the insufficiency in art.
(The lack of lovely parts.)
A broken leg, a missing heart;
patience. Pretend for now
destruction has a good, redeeming end,
that there will be a mend.
Retire the white suede, white and blue lights,
then sleeves of honest drumroll, applause, and
there is still renewal in your sleight of hand,
exhuming any trick hollow in space,
top hat, a snap, and the white of rabbits
defying the absence of white rabbits.
Tonight you performed for the last time;
a living thing is always a surprise, but
their innocence should not have strained
at least a trained one like yours, in meeting
death—the hat was only meant for one—
and now, alone, you think about the fate
of harmlessness confined inside a hat
with hot solitary magic; did they feel hate
or fear in the tragic stifling, the waiting
to appear?
The audience was horrified at encore when
Lovely Annie dug the snub-nose in your back
and fired three times, smile unbroken. When soon
you revived and received the wash of ovation;
the brick-red syrup was already dry, like paint.
Lovely Annie is recently at rest.
Yesterday, you wore the bleeding shirt
in your bedroom, before the mirror. The linen
was starched to abstraction. You squeezed
a cufflink, pouches burst. And bled—
the asymmetric blooms
like every trick, are fake.
Or, fake seeming. You see
your dark and ridiculous career
summarized before you.