Ovation

I try to make myself afraid, the way you must have been afraid, stepping out onto this stage— but with a fear so pure, so perfectly informed that you strode out shouting. Here, where the neon yellow arrows painted on the floor shoot forward underfoot in blackness—beneath the hanging sequence of tinted skies—out toward that mindless immortalizing light, now dark. Now I think I feel the heat you must have felt rising from the front rows. A gaping fire door, a furnace: your single body standing here with no shadow, swinging on itself. Had you been a fool, you might have thought that they loved you. They never love you, you said. They are hungry for the god in his gold eclipse, the pure you on fire. John and I move quickly, each with a handful of ash, scattering. The sound of no sound falling into the cracks in the boards, the footlights, the first row. A small personal snow: a prince of dust, a villain of dust. Each part you played drifting up again, recomposing. I open my hand, I let you go—back into the lines you learned, back into the body and the body's beauty— back into the standing ovation: bow after bow after bow.