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Poetry

The director asks Zero
if he’s awake, is he listening
to anyone besides his
own inner and outer
monologues. “Isn’t this
a solo performance?” Zero
answers. “If not, show me
the way out.” A silence
descends, the lights fade,
and Zero is once again
alone, nothing he can’t
cope with. He finds
his hat, a brown fedora
he bought years ago
near East Broadway
the day before his father
died, also alone, in Bellevue.
Something about an empty
theater, with the lights
low, the rows of plush
red seats at attention
inspires in Zero the true
Shakespearean moment.
Never a king or a father,
he knows he is Lear as no
one else possibly could be,
Lear with a slight Bronx
accent and less than a full
head of gray hair going
white, Lear, the former star
around whom the young
orbited until he fell off
into darkness and drowned
in storms of his own making,
Lear with a fool always
at his side or even closer.
As the lobby door crashes
and locks behind him, Zero
greets this spring afternoon
with glee. To the right Broadway
beckons, and he is free
to waddle as best he can
past the electronics stores
and the reopened porn shops
whose presence delights him
though he never enters. The city’s
coming back from premature
death, the city is Zero, he thinks,
we are one, and his good eye
confirms it, catching a stack
of tabloids braying against justice
in high places. The traffic
screams around him almost
drowning his regrets. He could
hail a taxi to Central Park
to greet his vegetal nature
and stare for hours as he did
in childhood at the caged,
sagging beasts who told him
forty years ago exactly
what waited. No, no, no, no,
no, the words that bloom
so easily they’ve become
his single mantra at all hours.
Turn left at Forty-ninth Street,
he thinks, and eventually
reach the Hudson, the docks
collapsing into litter, the liners
long gone. Turn right for
something just as bad. He stands
frozen in the middle of
the crossways as the crowds part
around him, unfamiliar people
of every shape and color,
their curses or pleas arriving
in a Babel of shouts. Is this
the barren heath of age and exile?
Again no, answers the blaring traffic
inside his own head, this is Zero.

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The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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