Run the Red Lights. Ed Skoog

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       This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible.

      For Jill and Oscar

      and for J. Robert Lennon

      Contents

       Title Page

       Note to Reader

       Dedication

       Gwendolyn Brooks Park, Topeka

       PART ONE

       Being in Plays

       The Children’s Theater

       Grateful Dead Tapes

       Ode to the Macarena

       The Empty House

       Driving

       When I Was Living in New York City

       Playing Banjo

       Karaoke

       The Immortals

       Run the Red Lights

       PART TWO

       Hurry

       Waves

       Showering at Night

       Paintings and Drawings

       Cafe Racer

       The Shadow of Eros Covers the Scene of Loss

       My Bodyguard

       Red Desert (Antonioni, 1964)

       The Second Spider

       Looking for Work

       Fladry

       PART THREE

       When

       Sparrow

       Unknow the Dying Sea

       Rail Station under Construction

       Listening to Radio at Work

       Downstream

       Free Climb

       Black Rolling Bag

       Hamlet and Gretel

       About the Author

       Also by Ed Skoog

       Acknowledgments

       Copyright

       Special Thanks

Gwendolyn Brooks Park, Topeka

      A creek, like a paper fold, runs

      one corner to the other

      out where the roof of the dead

      mall directs sunset to irradiate

      her name, in city-carved letters, gold,

      the wood around them green.

      And then at midnight,

      apartment windows hold

      star and satellite in the cold

      twenty or thirty blocks

      from first breath of her infancy

      in one of the few cities

      (Tupelo and Pretoria are others)

      that carries the letters for poet

      without port or point in its name.

PART ONE

Being in Plays

      Ethics are learned from who you sleep with

      the first few times, and theater is sex,

      almost. Being in it, I mean, and being young,

      with a lot of group undressing

      and silence in darkness, chaste

      permissions of the cast party,

      spiked punch in the recreation room.

      I was always cast as Old Man

      with tennis-shoe polish for white hair

      and lines drawn where my lines now are,

      forehead haiku, the eyes’ briffits,

      and parentheses around the muzzle.

      I guess I miss it, achievement’s sense,

      the way a show’s run ends

      and everyone knows it together,

      a social pain, like the death

      of a popular imaginary friend.

      When lights between scenes dim,

      I like to see actors take props offstage

      or team up with stagehands to move

      the built elements of our fantasy.

      I hope they keep going, and sneak

      some of the properties home to mix in

      with their private dramas. I pass theaters

      the way I pass churches, but like

      better this foldable theater

      half-constructed in the mind,