There is a theater I like to visit.
In the center city it stands.
It has an implacably golden ceiling.
When I go to the theater I sit at the top,
in the nosebleed section, in the very last row.
In this way, I am closer to the bright surface.
It sparkles above me when the house lights are on.
From here, at the top, the pinnacle of the building,
I look down on all the audience around me.
In my seat high I do not feel poor or underdressed,
but proud, triumphant, listening and ready, so eager.
I watch the people around me: all in different spots,
at different angles to the stage, so what they see and hear
is always different from one place to the next.
There is a man in a dark suit by the balcony rail.
Down in the orchestra, a woman in a coral dress.
There a young couple, there an old one.
Each person at a different angle, a different position to the stage.
How many different perspectives are in this theater,
and in all this world, so many ways of seeing things!
From youthful-buoyant, to adult-cautious, to aged-reflective,
one moment living, the next looking back on the wonder of years
lived long before, their substance lost to stony time.
I am bold to say that this is a world of perception,
a world of filters, perspectives, experienced by us.
It is lived in and through the mind, to each one different,
to each one placed separately, all around the wide earth.
I feel this as I sit in the theater, waiting for strains
of music to be sounded, the concert to begin.
I am close to the golden ceiling of this radiant place,
so tall, so tightly packed, featuring, within it,
the widest possible spectrum of all lived experience.
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