The Impresario (part two)
The Impresario
Part Two
In his dreaming calculations lying wakeful
He recalls himself, in this bed built for a dying wife
Never so alive with fear for his charges
He had always paid the roustabouts
To guard the wagon, warned Tortu
Whose wise and solemn eyes obey
To take a crown and buy them cakes
To keep his creatures cloaked and masked
Until the day
Now answering in kind he follows clues
Wordless, the distance tightening
Until the rigid half-circle they’d sketched
Became a letter G
Through the seat of commerce with his spine contracted
By an unexpected terror of its shadowed lanes
He searched for symbols, charcoaled, and at length
Traced a pathway marked in cornerstones
Blacked atop with compass lines
Arrows pointing east
And when he came to a butcher’s stall
Where piglets hung like tally marks, in chords
He ducked behind and found a row of houses
Counted on his left an open courtyard
Counted on his right…one, two, three, four
She had swallowed a wasp on Saint Thomas’s day
Eleven months undelivered
A log of wood burst with a shocking report
Spewing sparks that caught fire among the rushes
A heated swarm escaped
The household in a frenzy as the maid
Had at that moment touched a goblet to her mistress’s lip
All is deathly calm now, the rooms unlit
A wine butt holds the offspring born
Turned inside-out
He has been shown this, cautiously, the lid pried loose
His host with timorous courtesies had laid
His board with a fair day’s bounty
“Yes,” he’d said to the impresario, “if I might not tempt the devil
By showing gold, I would reward you for this kindness.
You deliver me, no less
In taking her from my house.”
Impresario
Part Three
(2016, Stephanie Foster)