Forget Magazine. Remember, Remember, Remember.

Eclogues Of Escape I
(in which Houdini the myth is considered)
By Steven Price

Key: Ehrich.
                      Houdini.
                                     He knew himself wholly
            in that other. Ropetrod or strangled stage
            right, rumpled in trunk tricks, flushed, tousled,
             allowing magic's antic, contrary, quarrelsome
             right to brag and strut and bolster men
             awake to strangeness and the bloodclock in
             their skulls. Coalbox, bolt-ladder, paper crate,
             weed-tire, chain-grip, each weird escape a kind
             of anger felt at being held hard down
             as if such letting-go or slackening
             might drain him of his self: the struggle less
             a slaking of the fists than of the mind.
             His life raised and raised again in metaphor;
             his words laid out in tackled thunk and buckle,
             chest or leather-rot, thick holdings hoarding
             thicker words like coins: never less himself
             than in the language of old locks, closings,
             the given. Life a kind of end-stopped line,
             measured in the breath and bloodbeat of it;
             he turned from all of that. Escapes each night
             stank of musty centuries of magic:
             the stiff, leathern satchel his flesh became.

Latch:    He held his life in his teeth like a key.
             Freedom meant restraint, finding one's place:
             a warm rope fed and bellied him at the first,
             a cold rope will lower his casket at the last.
             What he escaped to, what he escaped from--
             were these so different?