ANNE CARSON
"My Show"

I was born in the circus. I play the flat man.
My voice is flat, my walk is flat, my ironies
move flatly out to sock you in the eye.

Hands, feet, vowels, hair, shadow, feelings of community,
strings (you do not see) all flat.
The epic model I guess I’ll

pass over. Homer likening stalemate in war to a carpenter’s
chalkline. My flat world cost only $2 to view
at first, later this price like others went up.

Brute natures and angles in transparent draperies all alike
enjoyed the show. Flowers fell
transparently off them as they entered my tent

where air was of course planar. In some other world they
could have stayed organized but something about me
cast their placards down (flat, yes):

Brechtian. See a flat rat escape that one-dimensional skull.
And then, and then, what whispers there.
Your agony, mine, in the fully consensual design

of this play of light—you crowd of missing ones,
return the ball to me! whispers, whispers and her voice
(she never arrives) froze on the knock.

Flat thunder, all my heart, you might use Brahms behind it.
Dull, whitish, deadly as a carpenter’s chalkline.
Not Beethoven—Beethoven I cannot flatten.