Why Yes, Poetry Friday is Following Me

This seems to fit with my week of energy and exuberance that is engendered by my new career direction. This poetic gem is from a collection of performance poems Clay Feet/Wire Wings by John N. McDowell. The happiest of Fridays to all.

God the Director
for M

Yes, if you can, but you're in love with impossibility.
Ismene to Antigone

My God!
It was utterly amazing, incredible.
It blew my mind!
thus God enters, arms gyrating
air to such attention that every head
turns, every eye focuses;
the room called to attention and, yes
whatever she has just learned from
whatever play, performance, person,
she has just seen or spoken to, is so incredible
it much be known: Now!

With God there is no disbelief
or lack of what can be learned.

God has boundless energy,
a flight to New York to open a show
back in a day for another rehearsal.
Always on the phone, on Facebook,
her emails peppered with phrases in capital letters.
Her language often blue as the ink
in a tattoo parlor.
She loves to eat and laugh.
She sleeps late; arms, legs, blankets tussled and tossed
as if her dreams are discarded props
for a play yet to be performed.

But no matter, God understand
how all the world's a stage
and that she must care for all entrances and exits
as well as what happens when the lights come up.
She's worked the standards:
Shakespeare, Wilder, Albee and the more
edgy moderns like Beckett and Stoppard.
and to wide acclaim did Fiddlre on the Roof,
but more and more she began to question,
(as God is want to do),
the value of such theater.

For all the applause
the lights go out.
In the world she noticed more and more
the subtle ways we enter and exit differing doors
not just on stage, but with faith and belief
and the many ways we unlock and lock.
Who is in, and who out, and why
some rooms are high and stone walled
and some bright with large windows, and so many
others dirt strewn and mud caked.
She understands more and more
that the really good questions lie
outside the gold-gilded rooms
of a fixed script.

So she began to document stories
and let her cast into the rage
of what is this all about?
as together they wrestle image and emotion
into story and performance.


God knows the truth.
Deep in all of us--even within herself--
there is always another empty stage
waiting: a house that needs to be filled.

So she seeks out the edges of cliffs
where a brisk wind howls,
and she is known for her capacity
to make her actors cry
believing as she does the words of the prophet Vonnegut
that in a fall off a cliff
one's task is to develop wings
on the way down.

It's not easy.
And she knows she asks a lot.
Everything, in fact.



So God explains again and again
her hands dizzy in their attempt
to make all in the room believe
that we are amazing, the best
she has ever worked with and every
explanation, everything she asks
every direction, every comment on staging
on script, on voice, on the way the body
must move through space--again and again
ends with an exclamation that is also a question,
her hand thrust against her forehead:
"You know what I mean?"

As if we do--whether actors or audience,
we will always answer, "Yes."
Even when we are not sure;
even when we don't honestly have a clue.
But that's all God needs: Yes.
However hesitant, however tentative, she'll run with it.
She will stage it.
It will be amazing, like grace.



That's the way God is:
"You know what I mean?"