14
PARTISAN REVIEW
The actor arrives at his pay-check
And the Elusive Thing called Fame
And he rehearses the fame every morning
That we rehearse the blame
We rehearse the blame yet we seize the lights
We rehearse the phosphene-spots, and
On the inside of the fallen lids
Of our expert-dreAmer's eyes,
None is that hero that dies
In the violet spot.
There is something we do
That is called Nothing that the actor
Does not do. Something that within ,the Plot
Of time we do not plot. Weare the unplotters
Unstringers. We grasp the scissors
From the palsied hand and we unscissor
And we deflower the dropped forgotten flower
That the stagehand fingers for a moment, then puts back.
There is nothing we have to say that
We do not lean over saying as
From a balcony, there is no balcony of words
We do not drop voice from as
From the murmurous one of Juliet
Sounding and unhinged from sound
Ah, honeysweet Romeo might be intercepted
By absence of that elocutionary sound
The night is a bouquet of a strange delay
And the day an instant of impetuous wait:
Cool and deliberate as a fan.
If we are monsters yet we have not masks
But naked stalk the naked idea love
If we do not love the way Time the actor loves
Under a sun of summer sumptuousness
We grow irrevocably, simply, tan.
We remember our inadequacy in our parts
Rather than our adequacy-
But we forget our inadequacy
