Smoke and Mirrors

he walked, slowly, out into the audience.

He pointed to my grandmother, he bowed.

a Middle European bow,

and invited her to join him on the stage.

The other people clapped and cheered.

My grandmother demurred. I was so close

to the magician that I could smell his aftershave

and whispered “Me, oh, me . . .” But still,

he reached his long fingers for my grandmother.

Pearl, go on up, said my grandfather. Go with the man.

My grandmother must have been, what? Sixty, then?

She had just stopped smoking,

was trying to lose some weight. She was proudest

of her teeth, which, though tobacco-stained, were all her own.

My grandfather had lost his, as a youth,

riding his bicycle; he had the bright idea

to hold on to a bus to pick up speed.

The bus had turned,

and Grandpa kissed the road.

She chewed hard licorice, watching TV at night,

or sucked hard caramels, perhaps to make him wrong.

She stood up, then, a little slowly.

Put down the paper tub half-full of ice cream,

the little wooden spoon—

went down the aisle, and up the steps.

And on the stage.

The conjurer applauded her once more—

A good sport. That was what she was. A sport.

Another glittering woman came from the wings,

bringing another box—

This one was red.

That’s her, nodded my grandfather, the one

who vanished off before. You see? That’s her.

Perhaps it was. All I could see

was a woman who sparkled, standing next to my grandmother

(who fiddled with her pearls and looked embarrassed).

The lady smiled and faced us, then she froze,

a statue, or a window mannequin.

The magician pulled the box,

with ease,

down to the front of stage, where my grandmother waited.

A moment or so of chitchat:

where she was from, her name, that kind of thing.

They’d never met before? She shook her head.

The magician opened the door,

my grandmother stepped in.

Perhaps it’s not the same one, admitted my grandfather,

on reflection,

I think she had darker hair, the other girl.

I didn’t know.

I was proud of my grandmother, but also embarrassed,

hoping she’d do nothing to make me squirm,

that she wouldn’t sing one of her songs.

She walked into the box. They shut the door.

he opened a compartment at the top, a little door. We saw

my grandmother’s face. Pearl? Are you all right, Pearl?

My grandmother smiled and nodded.

The magician closed the door.

The lady gave him a long thin case,

so he opened it. Took out a sword

and rammed it through the box.

And then another, and another,

and my grandfather chuckled and explained,

The blade slides in the hilt,

and then a fake slides out the other side.

Then he produced a sheet of metal, which

he slid into the box half the way up.

It cut the thing in half. The two of them,

the woman and the man, lifted the top

half of the box up and off, and put it on the stage,

with half my grandma in.

The top half.

He opened up the little door again, for a moment,

My grandmother’s face beamed at us, trustingly.

When he closed the door before,

she went down a trapdoor,

and now she’s standing halfway up, my grandfather confided.

She’ll tell us how it’s done when it’s all over.

I wanted him to stop talking: I needed the magic.

Two knives now, through the half-a-box,

at neck height.

Are you there, Pearl? asked the magician. Let us know

—do you know any songs?

My grandmother sang Daisy, Daisy.

He picked up the part of the box,

with the little door in it—the head part—

and he walked about, and she sang

Daisy, Daisy, first at one side of the stage,

then at the other.

That’s him, said my grandfather, and he’s throwing his voice.

It sounds like Grandma, I said.

Of course it does, he said. Of course it does.

He’s good, he said. He’s good. He’s very good.

The conjuror opened up the box again,

now hatbox-sized. My grandmother had finished Daisy, Daisy,

and was on a song which went:

My my, here we go, the driver’s drunk and the horse won’t go,

now we’re going back, now we’re going back,

back back back to London Town.

She had been born in London. Told me ominous tales

from time to time to time

of her childhood. Of the children who ran into her father’s shop

shouting Shonky shonky sheeny, running away;

she would not let me wear a black shirt because,

she said, she remembered the marches through the East End.

Moseley’s blackshirts. Her sister got an eye blackened.

The conjurer took a kitchen knife,