Somewhere in modernity, a New Woman
exits a stagedoor. The bloodstreaked ghostpale
makeup for her role
as ingenue in Goddess in the Underground
has yielded to freshness; next season,
if various plots mature, she will be Goddess.
The stalls’ and critics’ ecstasies
linger. Her silent assistant bears away
several nose-cones
of roses. She will find them vased
at home – save one,
stolen to grace
the assistant’s tiny immigrant apartment
and watered by nameless emotions.
A streetlamp limns the actress’s better profile.
Droshkies and broughams jingle to the curb,
are displaced (horses clopping
droop-headed off) by a jeep,
MG, and Rolls. A studied gesture
brings glove to dimple, choosing.
Across the street, an aging youth
wearing the Pierrot costume the system
demands of rebels, glares at the suitor cars
with a jealousy that at least is real.
He should be off being a genius
or blogging but in a way
he is at his post. Now fascists pass,
breaking heads and windows, obstructing his view.
(The driver of the jeep calls
HQ, but the time to shoot them
has passed.) The youth is tempted
to join them – let anger out, it’s easier
to despise women – but a miraculous,
unmotivated niceness
prevents. He goes off
to mitigate Third World conditions
several blocks away. At times the very white
whites of the eyes in dark
faces in lightless rooms remind him
how he looked at her.
Soon she’s the Goddess,
awaiting her car and chauffeur,
head full of film contracts and leading men,
when along the boulevard, narrowly avoiding
bouquets of surveillance cameras, swoops
a new two-person jetpack. It’s
a youth she has seen at the edge of the world,
well-dressed enough beneath the helmet.
He invites her for a spin.
I can give you my autograph here, she says,
and Pierrot, imploding, cries
that what he wants is her love – that since he saw her
as the Rebel Girl last year he can see nothing else;
neither ethics nor action nor madness nor pride
helps. How did you get the jetpack?
she asks. He shrugs, sighs.
She lets him down efficiently but gently.
He squares his shoulders, tells himself and her
it must be Art
she has decided to live for. No.