____________________________________________________________________________
A Film in Which I Play Everyone
In scene two, silence is a sleeve, I’m an arm in it.
In an outdated Hollywood magazine, I found a photo
of someone wearing my hair. How can that be?
Now I can’t stop thinking about the synaptic sparks
over which no one has any control. Or, they have some
control but not enough to count on in a crisis.
I’m making sense all the time of all the senseless endings.
A day is as long as the time it takes
for the mind to consider life and death countless times.
Which must make a day plus a night a highway
we’re only vaguely aware of since we’re busy
sitting in a chair or lying on a bed
with a floral-print bedspread or walking to the store
past someone with a dog on a leash and a phone
in their hand, into which they seem to be saying,
“That is not what I meant blah, blah, blah”
to an absent ear. Home, you unpack the items
you bought, crease the bags flat, stack them out of sight.
All without saying a word. This is a non-speaking part.
You’re an extra. That day you were filmed
on the steps walking into the school dance,
the costume you wore was pure you.
The set for the scene where everyone disappears
was painted Parisian sky-blue. The air burned
like a curtain on fire. The fire kept going out,
then being relit, a trick candle on a cake made of clouds.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems, including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, A Doll for Throwing, and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, and Purgatorio. Paradiso is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2025. She is also the translator of Colonies of Paradise by Matthias Göritz, and co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, forthcoming from Princeton University Press in November 2024. She’s been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. [Author photo by Carly Ann Faye]
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Dorothea Tanning, Self-Portrait, 1944, oil on canvas. [This is the cover image for Mary Jo Bang's book, A Film in Which I Play Everyone.]
