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East Fifth Street: A Poster for the Oresteia

Pasted bumpily on brick, life-sized. Inside, in a former foundry's casting vault, my father in the role of Agamemnon died. A thin-browed bronze mask skating

Anne Winters

December 15, 2005

Pasted bumpily on brick, life-sized. Inside, in a former foundry’s casting vault, my father in the role of Agamemnon died. A thin-browed bronze mask skating the bath-stair: “Know that in this House

an archaic anger worked: a child burnt down to soot-marks,v a king and king’s son coursed down the years.” He tookv the subway home at two a.m. He told me “Anne, if you’re empty and show it, empty inside, you’ll be invisible

to muggers…” I’ve found this true. The audience, tiptoeing off through the streetlit litter, sees across the street, in a blackened vitrine,

three hovering shapes. Rag-shrouded heads, long-skirted army coats and boots; and beneath the rags, the dewlaps and the smirched muzzles of the Furies.

Anne WintersAnne Winters's The Displaced of Capital won the 2005 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.


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