From the Ass’s Mouth: A Theory of the Leisure Class
Up on stage in the three-quarters empty auditorium,
the lights turned down, up where the auditorium resounded
to Midsummer Night’s Dream performed
clumsily by me reading out Bottom’s speech when he turns
from an ass back into a human while the rest of the class
sniggered or flirted, sat back and chewed gum,
the words in the auditorium lived out their hour—
and after rehearsal, when I got on my bike, red bike, fat tires,
to pedal home under cottonwood trees, I turned round corners
I’d never seen in our tiny mountain town,
years and years went by, I was still pedaling—
it wasn’t a dream except maybe in the way logic works in dreams—
I had two heads now, my ass’s head, my human head,
my ass’s bray more eloquent than my human bray
of wonder at my change: The eye of man hath not heard,
the ear of man hath not seen…my stumbling
tongue piecing through Shakespeare’s
bitter oratory about no bottom to Bottom’s dream…
I put my bike in the carport and started throwing
a tennis ball against the brick wall, thinking
over and over, no bottom no bottom—
the harder I threw, the more the words
weren’t mine, the ball smashing brick
while there in the auditorium the words
were like a taunt, like Theseus’s
taunts spoken behind my back because I was just
an ass not Duke of Athens: but after the play, the cast
gave me the papier-mache
ass’s head and I kept it first in the room I shared
with my two brothers, putting it on to sniff
the dried glue, feel the claustrophic fit, and stumble
half-blind to the bathroom mirror where I looked
out at myself through holes in the muzzle,
the ass’s painted on eyes and lips what people saw
when they saw me, Shakespeare’s words booming
back from the head’s suffocating hollows
coming straight from the ass’s mouth, not mine.
I don’t remember how, but it ended in an alcove
above the carport where it softened
on the chicken wire, the paper sagged
and began to flake away, the muzzle and the eye-holes
shrivelling into a gray, ulcerous mass—
when we moved from that town it got thrown
into the trash, taken to the dump and burned:
onion eaters, garlic eaters, hard-handed men,
that’s what Bottom and the mechanicals were—
and that’s what I was, what I’ve always been,
riding along on my bike’s fat tires
while that half god half man Theseus
laughs his courteous contempt of us whose
words come out like a tangled chain—which is
why there’s no bottom, why there’s never been
a bottom if you’re just an ass who speaks prose
to the Duke’s verse—an ass who kissed the Queen
of the Shadows and never got over it, my long,
scratchy ears and hairy muzzle pressed
to the ethereal, immortal, almost-not-thereness of her skin.
