INFERNO

At first there's greenish flesh until the knob's
turned farther to the right, and then the flesh turns paler, pink;
the gray walls behind the silent faces
shimmer, and next the sound's turned up,
the lips are moving, the hands, the voices, rising, moving—
is this what fright is, these
pale interchangeable faces,
is this the body of the world
that can be seen but never touched,

the faces floating there, the hands,
and all the broken things?
The set casts its flickering light onto the walls
as the ghost-bodies dressed in their momentary garments
bend to kiss
the gleaming armor of the world.
They have given themselves over
to quickness,
to sound bites, to thirty- or sixty-
second spots.

How slow we are against them
who dream of change but rarely, finally, change.
Now the man is walking toward the woman.
He sits down beside her on the bed,
the walls pale gold;
the bedspread flowered, gold. On her dresser
are many small bottles, delicate long-stemmed
vials, perfume and makeup,

and on the wall above it
a mirror that holds them from behind
showing us what the man and woman cannot see
of who they are; the man's broad back
in his striped suit, the woman barely covered by a negligee,
her brown hair tumbling down.
As if they had no names. As if they had no
faces, no address.
But she lifts her face to him

and her skin is smooth as the gold lamp light
falling in a calm closed circle on the carpet
so that we are meant to think:
it is important to know what happens
next. But how grotesque
they appear when I turn off the sound,
trapped in a world where speech is ceaselessly
required, in which mouths move and move
but nothing can come out

and still they must keep moving
the way neon pulses on and off, on and off
against a wall. No stillness there. No rest.
And no one can be left alone for long;
if the woman stands at her window
it is clear soon enough someone will come knocking
on her door. There is no room
for silence. I turn off the set.
I watch the dark blank screen,

how it holds only the merest shading of a face,
barely there but still it's there,
no sound at all, no humming sound, no hushed
electric purr, just blank
like the door a child wakes to in the night,
the voices shimmering and slurring
on the other side, in darkness,
but there is no screen to hold them, making them its ghosts,
there is no way to shut them off.