The Curtain
By Greta Stoddart
Perhaps you know that story where people
step out of this world and into another
through a particular split in the air;
they feel for it as you would your way across
a stage curtain, plucking at the pleats,
trying for the folded-in opening through which
you shiver and shoulder yourself
without a single acknowledging glance up
to the gods, so keen are you to get back
to where you were before you made your entrance:
those dim familiar wings, you invisible,
bumping into things you half-remember
(blinded as you’d been out there
in the onslaught of lights, yes, blinded
but wholly attended to in your blindness).
Imagine our dying being like that,
a kind of humble, eager, sorrowless return
to a place we’d long, and not till now, known.
No tears then. Just one of us to hold
aside the curtain – here we are, there you go –
before letting it slump majestically back
to that oddly satisfying inch above the boards
in which we glimpse a shadowy shuffling dark.
And when the lights come on and we turn to each other
who’s to say they won’t already be
in their dressing room, peeling off the layers,
wiping away that face we have loved,
unbecoming themselves to step out
into the pull and stream of the night crowds.
