but, perceiving its error, returns to astronometry.)
Poet: “He wants a linear narrative.
From here to there,
wherever here or there may be.”
I:iii Aching Back Knot Music
Groucho: “Do you feel lost? No star to guide?
Each crevice of the night sky burns
with messengers and charlatans.
You make the figures that you see, and I,
sky-pilot, shall instruct
you, Prince, invented Hero, and ignore
you, Papageno, who invents
as I, one day, invented you.”
Chico: “I’m the Doctor. Anything
you want I fix. My sonic tool,
my bag of Ariadne’s string,
my candy for the natives” (he displays
them) — “This guy’s my pal, the Harlequin,
who, only speaking music, cannot lie.
We’re at your service. Trust
me. Trust the Captain. We’re the crew.
We sell insurance also. All you do —
is ask.”
Harpo: (Lamb-eyed, a glutton for gold girls,
a Joseph’s coat, a tartan of significance, I have
no words. I am pure music. Call me Light
and I will leave you lighter . . .)
Groucho: “I’m the Captain. He’s the Doc.
The mute’s my bagman, courier.
I make your luck. Doc fixes if he can.
And in the emptied box, your life,
music is left, your light motif,
till it runs out . . .”
Poet: “Ping, Pang, and Pong.”
Prince: “Stop calling names!”
Groucho: “Power, glamour, victory
against the mediocrity
of cowardice or poverty!
Fist at the ready, you’ll control
all that might oppress your soul!”
Chico: “Money, money, money
casts a spell.
Money, money, money
makes you well!”
He tosses sequins, like flaked lights
or bees in swarm, small flecks of fire.
The Harlequin’s bag trousers swell
and suck them in.
Groucho: “Let me show you our maps.”
Chico: “Prospectuses.”
Harpo flashes open his overcoat, showing a postcard
pinned inside.
Groucho: “Your mission won’t be easy. Night
will fill your mind with fears and doubts.
Wild birds will utter nonsense in the trees
and north seem false to magnets.
Be deaf to idle chatterers. Be cunning,
steadfast, silent as a stone!”
Poet: “Silence is not my discipline.
You shut my mouth,
my belly grumbles just as loud.”
Prince: “Ssshhh.” (Scowls at the poet, takes the maps, eyes
briefly the closed overcoat, then, head erect
and noble, exits off.)
Poet: “Go, go, my prince, my literature,
my fib. You have the noble mind of art
and will not think of bed while glory lurks
like a lamed panther, fabulous,
and probably extinct, except
for prints I sometimes think I see —
a smell of death — But heroes cannot die.
They fade away!”
II:i Erl König Echt Music
A city park. A little pond in the distance
which reflects the moon. Stage front:
a small gazebo needing paint.
The Princess, who will not
be rescued by the hero but,
chatting with the handyman,
has made herself handy and escaped
from what Pandora’s box the plot
invented for her. Possibly
the Poet, tired of the Prince,
skipped half a chapter, let her out
upon her own recognizance.
They are picnicking by candlelight.
(The dog’s not moved. Its nose is on its paws.)
Princess: “I was born maimed in dreamtime, and my hands
undo the things they fabricate.
I pick up his messes and I mend
his socks, his shirts, his alibis.
My part is badly written. No grand deeds —
just patience and endurance. What a bore!
Besides, you make me double-faced: Odette/Odile,
or Columbine, who’s also aquilegia, an eagle-dove,
hag-maiden, Wendy who enslaves, whose mothering
means growing up, means death.
“Yet you’re the only friend I have. You sympathize.
Sit by me on the blanket. Sing of love,
of home, of happy days.
The Prince has his get-rich schemes.
He won’t talk to me. You, ignorant, loutish,
cheer me up. Explain the plot.
I like your explanations, though
I can’t say I accept them.”
Poet: “Yours is a better part than his.
He sounds like such an idiot.
Yet you are each the other’s half.
(Things only come in twos or threes
in stories.) You both are me.
Except I’m only half myself.
My better self, the shadow of my mind,
slips behind me when I turn to look at it
as if my look would hurt it, or as if
I had no shadow, am no thing.
“The Prince is me as hero; you
me as the heroine. You’ve more of me,
being housebound, except you are
too fine, too pure, too papery.
The egg that held you had no yolk.”
Princess: “A piece of you, the other side of him?
A sort of royal turtledove, a hen
to his sun-daring rooster, like a shade
defined by light, no thing
but contrast, opposite, Yang’s Yin!
What tosh!
A princess has a grandeur of her own.
Valour, adventure, suffering!
I force him to find truth where truth is hid,
and somewhat doubt he’ll find it, though I hint.”
She opens the picnic hamper and dumps in
the empty thermos, paper plates, takes out
three gussied boxes. “He must choose.”
Poet: “Not yet. The kings control him. We
are backdrop for his theatre, and you must grow
from chrysalis to Luna till it is
your beacon lights him through the woods,
the flames, the battles, later on.
I cannot think you further. You must go.”
She rises, snuffs the candles, and goes off.
Poet: “Lead’s the right choice. For silence is
golden and speech silver. Lead
is death. Mortality means life,
which means a choice.
He chooses her.
A poet chooses to be frog.
A kiss would make me nothing but myself.”
II:ii Epic Clammy Newt Music
Alone in the gazebo in the dark,
the Poet looks cold. The stars are bright
and something like a lantern in a tree
or a white balloon some child has lost
is all we have to see by. Mist,
soft as cygnet feathers, creeps
like frosted breath across the stage.
Crepuscular music might be guessed.
The Poet fetches out his flute.
Slowly, the horse inflates itself.
The Song of the Imitation Horse
in its Flat-Footed Pasture
Pegasus: “Believe me, for a moment.
My four feet
are not in their construction hoofed
as I pretend them, and my back
wobbles b
eneath no burden but
the sheeting on it. I support
the plot. You have no other plot
than this: the good’s besieged,
the bad ones seem to win,
the kind horse helps.
“I am that thing
in nature you make use of,
in your kin
you take for granted. I am what
depends on a construction in your mind,
a beast and a collusion in the flesh,
two-fleshed — a beast with one back
which is sheet
and more heads than are thinking.
“Wings are mine,
your Pegasus.
I fly no higher than you do.”
II:iii Minor Kleenex Sniff Music
Same set. A night bird’s cry. Leaves rustling.
The dog, asleep, is a dark shadow only.
The horse is folded up again.
The poet blows his flute but no sound comes.
The moon has risen higher in the sky; its light
stripes the grey canvas of the set
with a grave motley. From these shades
a pageant of attendants form: tulle,
tutus, watery diamonds. The kings
dressed in old newspapers sit,
stony on a stone bench, monkey-masked.
Poet: “What ho, a Watteau! Night
of masks and music, moony shine
replacing with oiled water (pitter pat)
the fairies’ decandescence.”
The mothy figures start to fade.
The Princess is disclosed
as crumpled as a Kleenex by the lake.
Poet: “The hero has deserted her. The swans
mourn round her in a mob of lace, evaporate.
She droops; she fails. Will Tinker die
in all this vacant prettiness?
One sigh would resurrect the belle
with a small tinsel jingle!”
Chico: “Come, come, I will refresh you.
What’s the truth? Is Pierrot prince?
You, Pierrette, who only have
a thimble kiss,
will grow up to play mother to lost boys!”
Poet: “But Wendy fades, Eurydice
who leads her hunters through the dark,
our evening star.”
The Captain rises, claps his hands.
Thin childish voices answer.
The little boys in their balloon
(a fire by night, a cloud by day)
sing their unworldly anthem.
False dawn, a clamour in the trees,
they draw the Princess after them.
They leave; she tags along.
Small water sounds. A Roland note (French horn).
Poet: “That music is not mine,
nor can I answer. Loneliness
overwhelms me like a thick disease.
I am untwinned, unwomaned, womanless.
And she was never part of me,
as fictive as a Leda’s egg, as beautiful.
“I’m not at home in poetry.
The mocking bird
makes its loud noises in the leaves
(allusions, it’s no plagiarist)
and treads its mate
and nests and rears its young — but I
am dumb, midnighted, and unpaged.”
He holds his hand out to the dog
who comes to it, sniffs, ducks the pat,
and goes back to its post.
III:i Anarchistic Naught Music
The poet, dog, and stone kings stay.
The light recedes.
The plashing of the lake subsides.
The moon has drifted off,
leaving the sky less luminous.
Cymbals. A crash of metal. The Prince
in phosphorescent battle garb,
bright as a dragon, swaggers on.
Ignoring the Poet, he gives the kings
a courtier’s bow (obsequious — and
arrogant).
Prince: “All has been written as foretold.
The teller’s been paid half-wages. Yet
Achilles’ arrow’s not yet spent
and tortoise history creeps on.
I must achieve my destiny!
I will accept
all your conditions, Majesties: fish stories,
maps, glossalia — the meaning matters little
when it means
me!” (The three kings bow, reseat themselves.)
“When’s the next swan?”
Poet: “The vanity of any pure conception boggles thought.”
Prince: “Do you deny the grandeur of my chords?
I must embark! My music calls me forth!”
Poet: “It does. The stage moves as you will,
our middle world, this media.
Obedient to your theatre, it may be launched.
An ocean streams before you, world
whose margin ever fades:
to strive, to seek, to never find —
“Write your white letter to the moon
and wear it into battle. You’ll survive.
A cliché is unkillable!”
Prince (correcting): “An archetype!” (Exits.)
III:ii Chicken Little’s Hat Music
Poet: “After him historians, bards, journalists,
you voters. He’s your True North, fiction,
precedent! All your excitement’s in his lies
which were, I think, at first my own.
I must disown him now he has
his other life.
Time will excuse, ennoble him.
“I could write more but all that’s left is wars.
You love to read about them, so
I’ll let you all imagine them.
You colourize the blacks and whites.
There may have been some greys,
or other colours. Blood. How should I know?
I hid.
“But now the election’s made. The extra strings,
the second oboist, the harp,
all those excessive trumpets, have returned
for the finale. Now
the skying hero, heroine,
have sung their final arias. Their crowns
mean dissolution. I outlive
my stories. In this place
I blow my whistle.
No one comes.
“I can’t make up what isn’t there. The sky
bears on its separating stream
the paper cut-outs of the stars, pure heroines
and heroes, kings in putty, sheep,
lost children, birds, and governors
washing their hands.
“They sink into the scenery.
Nothing is left.
Like the last pig in the nursery rhyme,
I cry and cry.”
The three kings rise.
Groucho: “Don’t panic as life peters out.
All history is juvenile, is story books.
I set this into motion and let you,
poor poet, prattle, but
the sting’s in the tail of the anecdote:
the crocodile
whose stomach clocks
the one adventure: braving Dad
(the ghostly Mr. Darling, one-in-three).
“It’s night. You cannot read the dial:
Count mortal, only the sunny hours!”
The kings depart. From offstage, Chico’s voice:
Chico: “Unfeathered biped, emperor’s robes
are not as warm
as swan wing, goose quill, chicken down.
Make a warm nest.
The winter howls around it.
Nothing’s safe.
You could die here, a nothing, all alone
strung out upon the stringing of your plot,
but try your fairy whistle once again.
You must believe.
Believe!”
The curtain falls. Th
e theatre grows dark.
The small, goat-footed collie takes the Book.
from
KEEPING AFLOAT
SOLAR REMISSION
The speaker suffers a flare-up of her crippling disease and enters hospital in delirium. As care alleviates her symptoms, her perceptions adjust, as do her attitude and concerns.
I
You came with me in the ambulance
You came with me in the ambulance.
You held my hand.
From the gurney I watched the ceiling flowers
spin and dissolve, like sentences
sleep sponges from a turning page.
A pencil with two waggling points
scratches my eye.
Nothing coheres.
Your voice like a gnat’s tongue:
lick and buzz.
I welcome the prison of illness, its barbed wire,
the dim, caged lights of its empty yard.
Night takes my dreams down from their shelves
and plays them over and over:
blank hallways underground.
Station on station my mute life hurtles past
in one lit window, lost.
The darkness washes over me.
I sink and sway in its loosenesses.
Above me you tug at my mooring chain.
Outside a city is happening,
weathers I cannot imagine —
Sometimes I don’t imagine you,
my vivid, temporary buoy —
I turn my head.
Your long eyes float away.
*
In this iron bed
I am held in a bracket, taped in a white sling,
strapped to a ticking metronome.
I rock as if I were travelling
night coach to nowhere, this iron bed.
The night light glows like a tiny sun,
hot as a fever, insular.
I hear the surf boom on a beach
as if I slept inside a shell,
my private door slammed shut.
*
I am dizzy, a little
Hot, raspy, dry, too tired to move,
I am, dizzy, a little,
but happy here,
sitting in the bright beach shade
in my sandy shirt.
So hot it almost hurts my eyes
like a weird headache.
Tiny crabs
scuttle over the picnic rinds,
mango, pineapple. The crabs
tug and swap shells,
squeezing into constricting cones
with their white fang claws.
Holding their house shells up like shields
they prickle across my sweat-drenched shirt.
And the blue, blue sea
rattles against the coral rocks,
and the bay curves into the blazing shore,
shining like glass.
Out there
the shrimp boats jounce at the paper edge,
their petal arms like insect wings,
faint pencil lines dissolving,
but
The Witch of the Inner Wood Page 20
