The Curtain

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Perhaps you know that story where people step 

out of this world and into another 

through a split in the air – they feel for it 

 

as you would your way across a stage curtain 

   after your one act, plucking at the pleats,  

trying for the folded-in opening through which 

 

you shiver and shoulder yourself 

without so much as a glance up

to the gods, so keen are you to get back

 

to where you were before your entrance:

those dim familiar wings, you invisible,

bumping into things you half-remember

 

blinded as you’d been out there

in the onslaught of lights, yes, blinded

but wholly attended to in your blindness.

 

Imagine our dying being like that,

a kind of humble, eager, sorrowless return

to a place we’d long, and not till now, known.

 

No tears then. Just one of us to hold 

aside the curtain – here we are, there you go –

before letting it slump majestically back 

 

to that oddly satisfying inch above the boards

in which we glimpse a shadowy shuffling dark.

And when the lights come on and we turn to each other

 

who’s to say they won’t already be

in their dressing room, peeling off the layers,

wiping away that face we have loved,

 

unbecoming themselves to step out 

into the pull and stream of the night crowds.