Vaudeville in the Dark by R. M. Ryan

Author:R. M. Ryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2010-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

MOODS FOR MODERNS

Now it comes to me:

I walked this street before—

why, it must be ten years ago.

I didn’t recognize it

coming up this way

but, yes, I lived

in that very building,

the La Mar, and walked

this way to work and oh—

I remember it now—

I had this vision once:

a man was sitting there—

in that exact window

eating dinner and looking out

benevolently on the evening

coming up around him and me

and all of us, I guess,

and the sunlight came across

the window at an angle, so,

leaving him half in darkness

and half in light, and I thought

this is just how things are,

and I meant to write down

what I thought, but I forgot to.

All I remembered was the phrase

half in darkness, half in light

and I said it to myself over the years

figuring it meant something

though looking now at the empty window

from another angle, it’s hard

to remember what I meant then

after so many days and nights

have been over all of us.

Why just today,

in a restaurant, I looked up

and saw a boy coming toward me

in a jacket with a label that read

Magic Mountain, and I thought

I was in a dream where the titles

of famous books appeared

on clothing, and I wondered

what The Moods For Moderns Store

will be showing for Pilgrim’s Progress

or Beowulf or The Turn of the Screw.

Is this what Keats meant

when he said that the poetry of earth

is never dead? The boy would tell you—

as he told me after turning around

and showing me the back

of his jacket with its portrait

of Sylvester the Cat looking

confident as ever—

that his mom got the jacket

at a theme park.

It was later

when I saw the La Mar

and stood there a while

as the sun was going down

and wondered where the man was

and what he’d learned

over the years we’d been apart

and then I remembered a letter

Hans Christian Andersen wrote

one evening in Naples about

a contralto who had, he said,

“a heart dissolved in melody”

and I wanted to think

we all dissolved eventually

in what we saw

while the sun was going down

just as it was

coming up

on someone else.

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