Puppet Show On A Rooftop
Roy Lazarus
17 August 2009, 04:15Dodging threadbare rickshaws, past loud honking cars,
Swaying down the disarrayed arcade, stalked by hawkers,
Who by turns take guesses at your ethnic origins –
Australian, Mexican, Italian, Spanish, Israeli?
And like archers running in vain after their arrows
That have missed the mark, sprint after you,
While you leave them all behind in the fine, evening dust.
And staggering thus, you find a safe haven – a roof top
With it’s spare spartan furniture, and a make-shift stage
On which a band of gypsies prepare for a puppet show –
Stringing the limp puppets, tuning their drums –
Testing the waters of life under the lights.
You order a hookah and kvass and fiddle with the coal
Because your lungs, stiff with carbon, are too dead
To draw in that mighty first breath that gets the smoke
Of apples and ecstasy flowing through your parched veins.
But your fiddling is not clumsy, certainly not.
Even in the inelegance of your incompetence lies
A certain mysterious elegance – like solid particles of
Nicotine in the fleeting limpidness of your cigarette smoke,
That you love to blow like you were the next James Dean.
An Arab comes to your rescue, fanning the coal,
Picking up your smoldering, scattered pieces with silver tongs
And basically gets you started on the road to high salvation –
You smile, say “Shukran” – the only Arabic you’ve ever known –
And wonder why the world hates them so much?
You take a sip and a drag and try to reconstruct old images
In your head – arranging picture postcards in geometric patterns
That just might come to mean something, someday?
The kvass smoothens the sharp edges, the little irregularities,
And you think of those long days spent on her soft lap,
In the cafes dotting the long, winding river of gloomy glory,
While she read out to you from her battered copy of Odysseus,
Ruffling your hair with one hand, patiently intonating
Every word, every syllable, lest you lose your grip and fall
Down the black precipice that always hung under you.
But now you know, don’t you? The fall has its pleasure too.
The kettledrums pick up the slack, the music frenzies and
The puppets, they sway awkwardly as ever –
A lifetime spent dancing a grotesque dance to an arabesque tune.
A girl with short red curls and a piercing in her lip
Comes up to you, swaying slightly, asking you if it’s true
That you’re part Irish? And you realize then, that the arrows
That missed their marks, were not arrows but boomerangs
Come yelping back to you out of the thin air to knock you out.
And despite the sweet voice of Homer, quietly telling you
That you are none other, no none other than Odysseus himself,
You still search for hidden messages in elaborate plays,
In whispered words, in garbled songs, in written lines:
Look inside – fears eating into soul and body; Odysseus reflects ennui.
