East Fifth Street: A Poster for the Oresteia

By Anne Winters

This article appeared in the January 2, 2006 edition of The Nation.

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.

About Anne Winters

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