Really, the old guy impersonated
himself, the rolling eye and teeth-bared grimace
straight out of silent movies. He’d known
vaudeville too, and, in the old sense,
burlesque. Gestures from Yiddish theater—
his parents’ solace—peppered his talk,
his snatches of Shakespeare.
In his teens, he’d had two lines
on the same stage with
Mrs. Patrick Campbell—
“Brilliant! and so gracious!”
—and at sixty-five he risked fractures
in a mock sword-fight and tumble
in some hick Bicentennial epic:
“I had to take lessons! Bruises for weeks!”
One day, he told me,
in his antique shop in the Village
an oddly familiar-looking woman browsed
but chose nothing. Turning to leave,
she spotted a tiger-eye necklace,
asked him, “May I?”
Before the shop’s trifold mirror
with its audience of three, she was ‘on,’
her face and body came alive,
so that finally he was certain
who she was. “Yes,
I’m Marilyn Monroe,” she admitted,
and in telling me this story
for once he kept his face still,
his voice soft, his gaze distant
at the remembrance of beauty,
how it had grazed him
in his lifetime.
Lynn D. Gilbert’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Appalachian Review, Arboreal, Blue Unicorn (Pushcart nomination), Consequence, Light, The MacGuffin, Ponder Review (Pushcart nomination), and elsewhere. Her poetry volume has been a finalist in the Gerald Cable and Off the Grid Press book contests. A founding editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, she lives in an Austin suburb and reviews poetry submissions for Third Wednesday journal.
Euphony Journal 