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BomberJacknut
The chair creaks as
I rise from it;
god, what a horrid
sound.
As I walk through
the room, the dust
scatters from me
like scared little bugs.
I tear those
sickeningly yellow
curtains
away from their charge
and flinch
at the equally
revolting
sun.
The curtains
That cover those windows
Of yours
Won't protect you
From society
The only thing
That will
Is you
I am what is around me.
Women understand this.
One is not duchess
A hundred yards from a carriage.
These, then are portraits:
A black vestibule;
A high bed sheltered by curtains.
These are merely instances.
So this was all there was to the great play
She came so far to act in, this was all--
Except the short last scene and the slow fall
Of the final curtain, that might catch half-way,
As final curtains do, and leave the grey
Lorn end of things too long exposed. The hall
Clapped faintly, and she took her curtain call,
Knowing how little she had left to say.
And in the pause before the last act started,
Slowly unpinning the roses she had worn,
She reconsidered lines that had been said,
And found them hardly worthy the high-hearted
Ardor that she had brought, nor the bright, torn,
Roses that shattered round her, dripping red.
In the tired face of the mirror
There is a blue curtain reflected.
If I could lift the reflection,
Peer a little beyond, I would see
A boy crying
Because his sister is ill in another room
And he has no one to play with:
A boy listlessly scattering building blocks,
And crying,
Because no one will build for him the palace of Fairy Morgana.
I cannot lift the curtain:
It is stiff and frozen.
New neighbors came to the corner house at Congress
and Green streets.
The look of their clean white curtains was the same
as the rim of a nun's bonnet.
One way was an oyster pail factory, one way they
made candy, one way paper boxes, strawboard
cartons.
The warehouse trucks shook the dust of the ways
loose and the wheels whirled dust — there was
dust of hoof and wagon wheel and rubber tire —
dust of police and fire wagons — dust of the winds
that circled at midnights and noon listening to no
prayers.
" O mother, I know the heart of you," I sang passing
the rim of a nun's bonnet — O white curtains — and
people clean as the prayers of Jesus here in the