Poet's Choice

held aloft nightly to shadow forth past performances,

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like the echo of a hermit-crab-deserted shell.

Is it still in use? No prop man could throw it away.

Did he love puns? Was he the boneheaded sort

who felt Ophelia must be played by a man

because she would have been in Shakespeare's day?

Did he upstage a friend? Was he gifted enough to?

Sir Something. Arthur, George? Frederick.

It's killing me, since his whole idea was to be

remembered -- literally -- letting his too solid skull

stand for his love of the curtain-hush, the lights,

the flourish of lines and crushed velvet and the gasp