[reimagining a PBS interview with
Dame Maggie Smith, the poem being her answer to
the questions about her 'process'...in a kind of monologue with her own soul as she was entirely evasive in response to the question posed by Charlie Rose. So I made up an answer in this poem just by imagining her voice and how her voice would sound reciting it which is an even more evasive answer because who can be obliged to answer a question frankly about the artistic process in his or her own soul IN PLAIN POTATO REDUCTIONIST PROSE]
coming from the cinema I met my soul
caught in the tread of the moviegoers
exiting;
whirling in the turnstiles.
dream on dream in the seam of all this seeming
I feel carpet-tacked under the shuffling
sometimes in the scarlet lobbies of the world
she said to me, on the escalator, going down.
is poetry dead? is there an arrow in my back
skimming the moonlight at the crossroads?
it snows on the screen and I am cold
and stitched by the anti-heroes to the track
with my best silver sash I never lent them
and only God to lean on when the train comes.
somewhere there is thick soup and a pale blue
shawl,
Chopin's etudes and the blossoming trees
beyond all this popcorn and the flatlands'
flash.
and is my jeweled kaleidoscope
still trained on the moons
I left for you at home
dissolved in sequined weeping near the weeping
cherry?
oh nowhere do I find
the citron country sung of long ago: .
the silken maps the missing compasses
for the kingdoms broadly confiscated, never
atoned for…
oh what can I begin to say
who still can see in bright array
the subtexts of the brave and free
shifting imperceptibly
from stage to stage.
at the gate of every village left on earth
gold coins
rained down her face instead of tears
as in the ancient fairytales when the sun
appears
or near the atriums, decked in pearl-on-pearl
she merely stood
embroidered with laments from the dream-time.
unraveling:
like party favors at a birthday.
or what can I pretend to know
who saw the weeping cherry go
in winds that heeded not my will
in a tinfoil crown that's shining, still…
is there feeling anymore she asked the
straggling children
in the afternoon-
before the sun fizzles or the universe or
wouldn't you like to know.
what is the sun they said
descending like no twelve
princesses ever could.
she fastened her words to the spokes of
the winds behind them-
are you lost she said, almost in velvet
prodding with a violet hatpin
a tearful music, missing home:
..brief -charioteers-
in the mesmerizing tread of the tread and the
tread of the knock-off party shoes
plodding on in front of you, and filing on and
on
into a dungeon, and not a jeweled mine?
oh Love from love cannot be severed when
enchantment's thistledown blown down the
opaline anything
chimed from the stage God would have staged
for you forever
in any summer evening's lemon sheen…
lean, lissomely, to hear
her least soliloquy in a lilac picture hat
for the last rose leaving…
take the pale green daydream
wrapped for you in snow.
I really think you should
she whispered to the last child in line,
the one with the Juliet snood
and the cherry car-coat…
it may do you good.
mary angela douglas 23,24,25,26 march 2013
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