The Star

A portrait of a woman whose ambition and fame outpaced her self-knowledge, where crossing the line into stardom meant losing dimension while agents and do-gooders competed to reshape her.

A portrait of fame as disappearance, addressed almost as gossip - 'She was one of your friends.' She 'crossed the line, / but never came back,' 'Turned into a colossus,' and so 'lost demention,' growing monumental and hollow at once, 'never accomplishing what she dined on, / those Pyramid's that refuse to sink.' The poem locates the damage in the apparatus around her: 'each agent and do-gooder / had a better play for her,' and 'the real and unexaggerated problem was, / that power changes its dominion.' Its quiet verdict is developmental - 'growing up by chance / didn't happen to go along / with every scene and style she caught' - so that all her acquired power was still being performed 'in her extended children's theatre rehearsals,' a grown star arrested inside a child's unending rehearsal she never got to leave.