poetry by Charles Leggett

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"You can't eat faith."

    —Saving Aimee, 5th Avenue Theatre Company, Seattle, WA, Fall 2011, book and lyrics by Kathie Lee Gifford. 

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I. Dressing Room Inventory 

Retained, at this late date, are Wallace Stevens 
and Mallarmé. Six fifths of Powers gone, 
two pints of Maker's; in the drawer are fifths 
of Powers and, a spiritous negative  
capability of sorts, poiťin. 

Unsalted peanuts, scraps of makeup, mouthwash,  
some tumblers. All nine contest entry plays,  
already read, my rankings forwarded; 
all notes from tech recycled; script, New Yorkers. 

II. Internal Medicine

The pleasant hopelessness. Rebellious thoughts.  
The future difficulties one absolves.  
O flat horizon of sobriety.  
And in the doctor's office would one have 
 
such courage, such resolve, such bracing lilt  
that scales the seeing of, what is the fear? 
Useful, in the manner of inverted  
Tarot cards, to know what one can't manage? 
 
The fear of poverty and loss. Not death 
 – that's unavoidable. Humiliation  
 – though not the schoolyard type; it's not that others  
would laugh while one is dying. One does love 

one's non-dependence. Far less burdensome  
(for all), aloneness – even welcome, in  
its tawdry way. Evasively sublime.  
A vaguely graceful elegy-in-death? 

Or else a fat-faced, long-haired and uncaring  
lurch directly towards it? at St. John's,  
the windows open wide upon the glib  
sachet of Pike Street life: the modulated  
shuffles of the drunks; the strolls of Silent 

Majoritarians – alone and used  
to it; young women speaking to their men  
with animation while the men devour  
bräts with hunger that is visceral  
and do not hear a word the women say. 

But also something of the masters' hardness,  
their pedagogy. Ibsen in Peer Gynt 
 – that being all one can, takes holy strength.  
A strength that it grows easier with age  
to either use more deftly, or to lose. 

Finally kenning how one fits (and doesn't)  
into life as it is lived – then time,  
equalizer of analogy,  
masked as mere description and submerged  
in sumptuous tone, reveals its growing shortness. 

Humiliation in the face of one's  
own weakness. And that's right where all this world's  
Aimee Semple McPhersons – for that matter  
its medical professionals – step in  

and make their mint. An A.S. Mac will sell you  
the aching bliss of your forgetting all  
the weight your view of your own troubles doubles.  
You sell your soul for letting go that weight.

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Charles Leggett is a professional actor based in Seattle. His chapbook manuscript “Hard Listening” just came out as one third of Ravenna Press’s Triple No. 25. His co-adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s THE LOWER DEPTHS premiered as a co-production of Seattle’s Intiman Theatre and The Seagull Project last year. In the 8th grade, Charles wrote a snide editorial in the school newspaper making fun of Dungeons and Dragons; word came to him subsequently that a DM had cast a spell on him, and that he would be lucky to be walking within a week. This is how Charles knows that he is lucky.