Improv, Week 5

Poem: “Advice to a Prophet” by Richard Wilbur

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God's name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?--
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone's face?

Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters. We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin's arc, the dove's return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

Revision: Advice to the Prophetess at the He & She Hair Salon

You speak of Mrs. Tiller living in sin with her lovers when her husband is away. You speak of her son, the rapscallion, who stalks still at the dive bar, The Junction every Thursday as he drinks to himself and his only companion, the Ferrari. His wheels on heels so to speak. You pinpoint every hair on poor Ms. Decker’s lip, never forgetting the tsk before whispering spinster with your eyes upturned. You tell stories that are not stories. Fragments I say. Truth you reply.

What should we be without these things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken? Ask, I say, ask what it means to remember your own birth, think back and remember the womb and wonder still whether thoughts so lofty and wise simulate Mrs. Tiller’s pink toes as a child so new. Or young Johnny with his Ferrari, such a fleeting thought to the history of playground swings and sitting always alone in sandbox castles. Your words will fail us, under the scrutiny of each quick shear of the bangs, paid in full and the echo of steps leaving behind discontent words.