Of course, the familiar rustling of programs, 
My hair mussed from behind by a grand gesture 
Of mink. A little craning about to see 
If anyone I know is in the audience, 
And, as the house fills up, 
A mild relief that no one there knows me. 
A certain amount of getting up and down 
From my aisle seat to let the others in. 
Then my eyes wander briefly over the cast, 
Management, stand-ins, make-up men, designers, 
Perfume and liquor ads, and rise prayerlike 
To the false heaven of rosetted lights, 
The stucco lyres and emblems of high art 
That promise, with crude Broadway honesty, 
Something less than perfection: 
Two bulbs are missing and Apollo’s bored.

And then the cool, drawn-out anticipation, 
Not of the play itself, but the false dusk 
And equally false night when the houselights 
Obey some planetary rheostat 
And bring a stillness on. It is that stillness 
I wait for. 
                    Before it comes, 
Whether we like it or not, we are a crowd, 
Foul-breathed, gum-chewing, fat with arrogance, 
Passion, opinion, and appetite for blood. 
But in that instant, which the mind protracts, 
From dim to dark before the curtain rises, 
Each of us is miraculously alone 
In calm, invulnerable isolation, 
Neither a neighbor nor a fellow but, 
As at the beginning and end, a single soul, 
With all the sweet and sour of loneliness. 
I, as a connoisseur of loneliness, 
Savor it richly, and set it down
In an endless umber landscape, a stubble field 
Under a lilac, electric, storm-flushed sky, 
Where, in companionship with worthless stones, 
Mica-flecked, or at best some rusty quartz, 
I stood in childhood, waiting for things to mend. 
A useful discipline, perhaps. One that might lead
To solitary, self-denying work 
That issues in something harmless, like a poem, 
Governed by laws that stand for other laws, 
Both of which aim, through kindred disciplines, 
At the soul’s knowledge and habiliment. 
In any case, in a self-granted freedom, 
The mind, lone regent of itself, prolongs 
The dark and silence; mirrors itself, delights 
In consciousness of consciousness, alone, 
Sufficient, nimble, touched with a small grace.

Then, as it must at last, the curtain rises, 
The play begins. Something by Shakespeare. 
Framed in the arched proscenium, it seems 
A dream, neither better nor worse 
Than whatever I shall dream after I rise 
With hat and coat, go home to bed, and dream. 
If anything, more limited, more strict— 
No one will fly or turn into a moose. 
But acceptable, like a dream, because remote, 
And there is, after all, a pretty girl. 
Perhaps tonight she’ll figure in the cast 
I summon to my slumber and control 
In vast arenas, limitless space, and time 
That yield and sway in soft Einsteinian tides. 
Who is she? Sylvia? Amelia Earhart? 
Some creature that appears and disappears 
From life, from reverie, a fugitive of dreams? 
There on the stage, with awkward grace, the actors, 
Beautifully costumed in Renaissance brocade, 
Perform their duties, even as I must mine, 
Though not, as I am, always free to smile.
Something is happening. Some consternation. 
Are the knives out? Is someone’s life in danger?
And can the magic cloak and book protect? 
One has, of course, real confidence in Shakespeare. 
And I relax in my plush seat, convinced 
That prompt as dawn and genuine as a toothache 
The dream will be accomplished, provisionally true 
As anything else one cares to think about. 
The players are aghast. Can it be the villain, 
The outrageous drunks, plotting the coup d’état, 
Are slyer than we thought? Or we more innocent? 
Can it be that poems lie? As in a dream, 
Leaving a stunned and gap-mouthed Ferdinand, 
Father and faery pageant, she, even she, 
Miraculous Miranda, steps from the stage, 
Moves up the aisle to my seat, where she stops, 
Smiles gently, seriously, and takes my hand 
And leads me out of the theatre, into a night 
As luminous as noon, more deeply real, 
Simply because of her hand, than any dream 
Shakespeare or I or anyone ever dreamed.