I walked into a twig. Now, ten degrees to the right of where my sight is focused, The scar on my right pupil’s a gnat that both eyes chase. It makes me see my seeing. It flicks expertly to spots of meaning or surprise in paintings, road signs, faces; Dances a fierce jig if I sail up strange channels; limns the shapes of fear. As Luther saw the perils constantly teasing his soul by sidelong vision of devils That leaped aside when he turned to stare, I know the flow of humdrum habitual vision As a volley of passionate darts, sudden and manic as Cupid’s. My speck is an Alice’s keyhole to animal spaces: a bee floats to the neon tavern of lilies white to me, a hawk triangulates the scurry of prey, my lover smiles, a signal flashing through flesh and memory. Intricate as a city, vision and need run paired through such complexities they weave a guarantee: So much is what it seems, We laugh and cry with reason. But what absorbs me most, with an erotic sadness, is my incessant looking. I fret at the hectic angel, the small but enduring damage. This mote is a grain of death, looming in my sight like a cooling lover’s flaw.
Caught you, young actor! —miming
my stumble among pipes,
Weights, stymied bicycles.
You’re working up a role
I know, “a burly old barber,”
which I don’t want to watch,
Knowing the model you caught
sweating off a feast.
Here’s how it is with old legs:
youth has thrusting hams
But elders roll like sailors.
Later, those legs are stilts
Absurdly hinged in the middle,
and feet do not lift but slide
Across invisible ice.
Practice it when you’re weary.
Well— Break a leg! But first,
let’s trade: For my gait (free
To you, it cost me plenty)
a touch of actor’s method.
I have scenes ahead
that I would carry off
As if I truly played them,
wearing whatever motley
Fits the arriving plot,
greeting a self invented
In pleasurable collusion
with friends and the passing world.
Isn’t it odd? We play
more fiercely than we live:
It’s that I want the trick of.
I’ve watched you with your fellows:
even waiting in wings
Becomes a role. You flash
a glance for practice or stand
Arrested, scrolling a line
you must make new each night,
Your whole animal
alert to the flow you’ll enter.
A colt will dance and break
before a race but you, who feel
That surge, delight to ride it,
march to your mark, and top
The line that greets your entrance.
It’s not the hunt-and-seek
of youth I’d take, but the quick
Flame of engagement, as actors
breathe life into a script.
I want it for moments sure
to have no script, when simply
To play the human calls
for brave improvisation.
Perhaps it was always so
and I walked through my parts
As if not fully awake;
it never seemed an art
Till now, to play myself.
I am not my own hero.
Perhaps at a certain age
One ought to be, but no:
I do not walk the knife-edge
Of essential contradictions
that give a soul great scenes.
Meet a character actor!
I stand for the angle on truth
That time imbeds in a type:
like troupers rich in lives
Tried on, I know how many
ache to be unmasked.
And truly known at last.
I would not serve a muse
But Proteus, god of shallows,
who turns from an old man
To a fish or water-spout
or what he will, too fluid
To answer a dry question
but witness to the secrets
Revealed at moments of crossing.
Oh, we are torn. We want
repartee with the world
And it rushes past. My friends
grow choleric, impatient
With old error re-labeled
Genius, and new ones birthed
In the House of Neglect. The “can’ts”
of memory, sex, or hurry
Gorge our contempt at cant
in state or church; and we loathe
The unfailing cant
of the young as they take over.
Chameleon and quicksilver,
you know the shapes you take
In others’ eyes: by that
do you inhabit yourself
With deeper grace? A poet
once called his art the axe
That learns to carve its own handle.
An actor told me, “My mask
On stage is my unmasking.”
So with my age: I must
Step into a character
I find by stepping in.
In childhood, imitation
was the first instinct, a fountain
—To drink from it again!
But you with your quick ear
will hear Polonius
In all this: moralizing
to cover. Of course I hate you.
To think, how little you sense
the heart that shuffles off,
But steal my limp! One day
you’ll be a star, perhaps:
But for me now a planet:
a troubling portent, shining
Above us groundlings who stand
in the splatter of time and gape
As you speed across the staid
ensemble of fixed stars.
I told the med tech
I enjoyed the fitting up
because it was cross-dressing
as the Bride of Frankenstein.
Multi-colored tendrils
with little flowers of goo
drape from each hemisphere
of my brain; beside each eye
a sensor records my blinks
and closed eye movements:
they’ll make my eyelids flutter
alluringly for Frankie.
The straps that cross my breast
are like the ones that held me
as I convulsed to life.
A microphone at my neck
echoes my night sounds: sighs
and snoring, whimpers and groans.
My legs bear sensors: I know
I chase my dreams like a dog.
A thimble on my finger
tells what oxygen
runs in my stolen blood.
Bride that I am, I chose
this fitting, or else would feel
strangely violated:
enveloped, as some would say
they are by circumstances
less visible than these tresses
of bright wires. This cascade
from crown to ankle strips me
naked, enters me
in ways I have not imagined,
telling whether I dream
and do not know it, kick, pant,
or even cease to breathe.
The tech said, What am I then?
You’ll have to be a peasant,
slave to the grinding wheel
of daylight, who dares to creep up
close to the flicker of torchlight
from the high slitted windows,
the muffled ecstatic noises,
the restless life of a monster.
Glimpsed in the mirror, he snatches me Into the oldest comedy: We limp to a stage in a crowded square Where he leans for gossip and cups his ear At the quick city jokes and sexy shifts Of young love conspiring. He lifts A passing skirt and is slapped hoo-hooing, Cackles with joy at the scandal brewing. He is the perfect comic chorus, dense As the slowest of the audience, Astonished at the final turn of the plot— “He’s a girl! But he said he was not!” He is creaky and dry and abrupt as a cricket, Admits that his grasshopper is not as quick at Its business as once, but leers and nudges Close up to the mischief, and never budges. A hick in the city, his mind is a wain Piled high with matters he needs to explain To the citified: rural life and animal wonders And a hinterland of years whose weathers, Famines and pageants stray through his talk Without invitation, a wandering flock. A hurrying stranger asks for directions: He starts from a pent-up wealth of connections: “Which way to the palace?” “As a youth, I kept bees...” “Right or left?” “That’s right. My hives were near trees...” On stage, with his staff and dangling phallus, Or in the mirror, he offers solace: There’s always a farce with a place for us in it. We pant our way through a self-pitying minute As the lovers outrun us, raising laughter: But the chuckles are knowing, and softer.
Paul Hamill has published in Poetry, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Cortland Review, Diagram, and others. The most recently published of his collections is a chapbook, Meeting the Minotaur, from Split Oak Press, 2011. He retired from Ithaca College in 2011, where he had been a senior administrator, sometimes lecturer, and also, for a couple of years, county Poet Laureate. He spent last year as a Senior Fulbright Fellow at Lucian Blaga University in Sibiu, Romania, named for a great poet whom the authorities forced to refuse the Nobel Prize in the early 1950's. A sequence of Hamill’s poems and an interview with him can be found in the current issue of the Journal of American, British, and Canadian Studies (Romania).