I'll join the Community Theater or establish
the Community Theater if the Community Theater
doesn't exist to join. I'm tired
of checking my e-mail every twelve minutes,
hoping a message of love has arrived,
tired of being alone when I'm alone
and alone when I'm with people, and a musical
version of The Grapes of Wrath wouldn't be hard
to stage. We'd need dust mainly which is skin
mainly so we'd need bodies mainly, need grapes
and wrath and one chair for the director and one tree
to suggest loneliness at first and later
desperation and finally the tree would be a symbol
for the reach of the human spirit.
I often cry over symbols for the reach
of the human spirit though not when I encounter
the actual thing. When you turn my age, you give in
to some flaws such as the belief that jam
is one of the food groups or the tendency
to be more engaged by art than the souls
art intends to glorify. And obviously
there's the flaw of using the word art
twice in one sentence and also mentioning
the soul in that sentence means I don't know
what I'm talking about. I'm talking
about the distillation of experience to some kind
of point and the fact that people will pay
for tap dancing about starving and singing
about tap dancing and costumes, everyone
loves to see other people in rags. I'm thinking,
this could save me, spending all day in the theater,
all night rewriting the book, sewing sequins
to the eyelids of the actors, dreaming of New York
and roast beef sandwiches too tall to fit
in my mouth. I would most like to stage the end,
which I remember best from the movie
because I live inside the movies,
when the Henry Fonda Joad tells the mamma Joad
to look for him "Where there's a fight
'gainst the blood and hatred in the air."
Everyone's eyes would swell with proletarian
feeling and fellow man and woman feeling,
each person would think he is that guy, she is
that spirit, and I'd be clapped onto stage,
stomped into the light, I'd bow
and there'd be a party behind the curtain
and kisses made of champagne and I'd slip
away as soon as I could, as soon
as we became ourselves again, bewildered,
unscripted.