The Boy Juliet

No use my love of false noses then-

rouge to cheeks no longer in first blush,

pancake to the crow's-feet coming on,

I made myself young enough to play me at fourteen

stumbling over my dolls as I fell for a boy

from the wrong side of town.

I pitched her first, still girlish words

to the harsh-lit mirror in the dressing room:

I am here, what is your will?

My tiers of greasepaint nudged one another,

dark blue groundlings smudging gods' red lake.

The wig block never so much as blinked

from its deep breathless sleep

as that vestigial night watchman,

the stage manager, called quarter hour.

From a peephole in the faded curtain,

I glimpsed a house lit up with little dramas

played out unrehearsed by no one I recognized,

just ticket holders costumed in evening dress

who'd paid for someone else's troubles.

From those rows of inconstant moons

faceless in the dark beyond footlights' sunny glare,

mid-act l'd pick a lump of man

to court as Romeo furiously courted me.

Picking up those yards of skirt that tripped

nightly toward disaster, l'd mince my steps

to match her words. I'd pick apart a rose,

one petal Capulet, one Montague,

delivering the lines where I succumbed

to love, the contagion I was not to show

would kill before it cured. Still I think

of that boy plucking his eyebrows,

unknown first Juliet powdering the down

of his faint mustache. Padding his bony chest,

apprentice stuck in the role of yet another maiden,

the best he could get the rote promises,

when his seven years were up,

of the mouse-colored tights of a man

like the one who rushes to declaim

O sweet Juliet, thy beauty hath made me effeminate,

should the boy ready himself meanwhile

to die on cue once more for love.