The Paddock Review

DONNER PASS  

 

Once upon a time in the long ago

stage acting was thrust upon me 

at the tender age of ten

 

my having grown into the fifth grade’s 

annual communal tradition 

of tableaux vivants and historical re-enactments.  

 

Never my happy place, 

public soloing, 

piano recitals long raining torrents of torment  

 

nor – I knew as past witness –  

could proscenium or wings or vocal projection 

provide cover for even a bit player.

 

During a manic part of the nineteenth century 

in the wrong season on the wrong terrain 

the Donner Party took a wrong turn into history

 

which itself took a skewed turn in the minds 

of earnest teachers tangled up in notions of 

period appropriate costumes and bringing the past to life 

 

in the creaky wooden-seated auditorium 

of the hundred-year-old bell-towered brick grammar school 

still standing with architectural defiance in the later twentieth century. 

 

The contradictions of the concept lost on the adults 

the grand guignol aspect lost on none of the students 

(although we did not know that term then) 

 

there was thus much mustering of resources and enthusiasms 

much whirring of parental sewing machines, not so much 

of hammer hitting nail and wood, set design being minimalist, 

 

so that verisimilitude became interpretive 

with clothing wandering like Donners 

somewhere between colonial and pioneer. 

 

But oh the seams were straight and the cotton calicoed 

and duly if inaccurately attired with a mobcap atop my head 

fretful feet frozen to the floorboards 

 

snowbound 

within a script 

no one knew who had written 

 

I had one line 

one spoken line 

practiced desperately over and over

 

and uttered just before the curtain fell 

on the first act, my last, my only act: 

“Everything is going to be all right.”

 

 

 

This poem was originally published in The Ocotillo Review, 8.1.