Бой с тенью. Shadow Box. Зак Муча

      To see how hands could move he sought out

      Vegas sharps who performed in silence

      with names meant to be forgotten.

      He created seances of mirrors

      to slow time between bright spotlight gestures,

      watched his own hands from every angle

      until they belonged to a stranger.

      One morning he woke up ambidextrous.

      He learned not to look at the ghosts of his

      hands unless he wanted others to see.

      He disappeared himself, looking for a

      way to master that invisible gap

      between people where each space signified

      possible truth between words. He wanted

      to find the gap where nothing happens and

      nothing is said. He wouldn’t talk about

      his parents, but his sister was okay.

      I saw him first at a card table

      in a Mamet movie, lugubrious

      and hooded when calling the last hand in

      the United States of Kiss-My-Ass.

      He said the lines right, dead bored and angry:

      «What is this «marker’? Where are you from?»

      Not stomping along with the beat, drumming

      a bit ahead: «Who is this broad?»

      or dragging behind: «Club flush. You owe me

      six thousand dollars. Thank you very much.

      Next case.»

      Dismayed to see him giggling with talk show

      hosts, I expected a stone-faced disruption of

      the showbiz mutual non-aggression pact.

      I wanted the Jungian shadow of

      every magician, a criminal

      carrying the fantasied grace and the

      palpable rage of a child ignored

      and a fake name so obvious it was

      more real than birth.

      He built his library and a thug took it —

      dismissive of the cup-and-ball trick

      depicted in hieroglyphics and the

      history of the world infused with fools

      or tricksters since the first owl-faced God

      scratched on rock – a foreclosed car lot cleared

      without a drop of sweat, just the brute force

      of a world where math is not memory,

      but the gravity of capitalism

      where there is no illusion and no grace.

      He held a bemused tolerance for the

      year he was born and the years in which he

      stood. The name discarded, a point of pride —

      like being born in a car wreck.

      Against that sadness, being outside time

      was another trick to save himself.

      A sold-out run at the Old Vic, the true

      sharps never came backstage, but sat with their

      new wives just off the center aisles.

      He breezed through the differences between a

      Vegas shuffle, a gin rummy shuffle,

      and a child’s two-palmed scramble to always

      find, as he said: «Oh, lucky me,»

      the ace of spades yet again.

      He quoted Seneca, Villon, and Shaw

      between dead cuts, bottom and second deals:

      «Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.»

      Audience members at each elbow he

      made the queens and aces appear at will.

      He simply knew where they were at all times.

      A woman from the BBC told once

      of his truculent participation

      in documenting his own life,

      (he refused to perform for her cameras)

      making her job more difficult than it need be.

      Lunch in LA, he chose the restaurant,

      pissed her off all day, and then, as the

      waiter took the laminated menus away

      from the glaring sun of the corner booth,

      made a block of ice appear between them.

      She didn’t know why she burst into tears.

      She asked: «Why did you do this to me?»

      He shrugged: «I lie for a living.»