There is to my knowledge only one completely indestructible
scene in the English dramatic canon.
Undestructible by a mediocre acting,
time cannot wither nor incompetence stain
the play-within-a-play in Midsummer Night's Dream.
You may remember its subject is tragic.
It's about the very unhappy unfolding
of several misunderstandings between the lovers Pyramus
and Thisbe who come to a grim end.
And you may also remember that the other players
in their tragedy include moon, lion, and wall.
So they will make small appearances in this poem
as well.
It's dedicated to the spectacular Welsh actor, Daniel
Evans, whom I first saw on stage play
the part of Francis Flute, who is the Mechanical, who then
plays Thisbe, but only after some protests about how
he has a beard coming and so really shouldn't be
cast in the lady's part at all.
The title of the poem is a slightly botched version
of a slightly botched compliment exchanged between the lovers.
Its "Eyes like leeks".
"It had almost nothing to do with sex.
The boy, in his corsets and farthingale.
His head voice and his smooth for the duration shin
was not and never had been simply in our pay.
Or was it some lost logic the regional accent restores?
A young Welsh actor may play a reluctant laborer
playing Thisbe botching similes, and stop our hearts
with wonder.
My young friend, he's seven, touched his mother's face
last night and said, it's wet.
And making the connection he has had to learn by rote.
You're sad.
It's never not like this for him.
'As if' the adolescents mouth wherever California spills its
luminous vernacular 'as if'.
Until the gesture holds or passes,
let's just say we'll live here for a while.
Oh, habitus.
Oh, wall.
Oh, moon.
For my young friend, it's never not some labored simulacrum.
Every tone of voice each give, each take
is rested from an unrelenting social dark.
There's so much dark to go around how odd
to be this and no other, and like all the others marked
for death.
It's a wonder we pass for locals at all.
Take Thisbe for instance.
Minutes ago she was fretting for lack of a beard
and now she weeps for a lover slain by a minute's misreading.
Reader, it's sharp as the lion's tooth.
Who takes the weeping away now takes delight as well,
which feels for all the world like honest work.
They've never worked with mind before the rich man says,
but moonlight says with flesh."