Wayne Koestenbaum

FILM SCRIPT IN A-FLAT MAJOR

conduct a moment from an early Verdi opera

in the manner of Leonard Bernstein

take off your shirt slowly

write a sentence with your finger on your chest

look up to the ceiling and silently count to five

then bring your gaze back down to me

put your shirt on again slowly

pretend you’re Queen Elizabeth

in the waiting room of a dermatologist

improvise a dance while keeping your butt against the wall

imitate the way your father or mother or brother or sister moves

I am a tree

I am a pile of fallen leaves

take off your first lover’s clothes

scrub yourself in the shower

close your eyes and imagine that you are getting a massage

lip-sync with ample hand gestures

make me a sandwich or a simple stir-fry

use your hands to create a cow or tiger or alien

tell me which scenes are important

and to whom they are important

a mechanical sound on the street is as usual my best friend

did you sign the letter

does the rumble in the back of the auditorium

signify your illness or your avoidance of illness

how rectangular or spherical can you make your response

to this testimony in A-flat major

I’ll remove the middle scene

and the close-up of your navel

I could hear the population cheering

I was once upon a time a ringleader of boycotts

I stepped down from my position after the fire

destroyed the film studio along the harbor

how ugly the harbor, how unfit for sorcery

and your musical gestures continued to undermine the kingdom

a beachcomber’s notion of kingdom

without castles or plunder

the movie will be three and a half hours long, in CinemaScope

I step over the dirty cavity separating us

a crevice filled with foul water

outflow from the kingdom’s matter-of-fact demise

can you kiss the castle’s crenellations

even if the castle doesn’t exist

remember, I told you this was a shattered kingdom

without castles and without climaxes

WAYNE KOESTENBAUM is a poet, critic, fiction-writer, artist, and filmmaker who has published over twenty books, including Stubble Archipelago, Ultramarine, The Cheerful Scapegoat, Figure It Out, Camp Marmalade, My 1980s & Other Essays, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Circus, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award). The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a Whiting Award, he is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center.