KAGEKIYO. What’s sad? The eyes of my heart see the things I want to see precisely as I want to see them. The flourishing capital, bravery at war, my own vigorous form …
SECOND BOY. Tell us a story about that brave war …
KAGEKIYO. And I can hear the sound of music from heaven.
GIRL. Play your biwa for us.
FIRST BOY. The one that goes beron-beron is the story of the Heike clan …
GIRL/SECOND BOY. Barari-karari, karari-barari …
The children help Kagekiyo take the biwa from his back. Kagekiyo sits in a formal posture and begins to chant.
KAGEKIYO. I myself am a general of the Heike clan, known by the name Aku Nanahei …
That name roars too valiant beyond comparison Kagekiyo …
KAGEKIYO. The Heike’s luck ran out at war, it is painful even to remember—in the fourth year of Juei at Dan-no-Ura huge numbers of Genji troops overwhelm the Heike boats …
A nun of the second rank the Emperor’s grandmother always ready she holds his majesty in her arms and steps to the side of the boat.
KAGEKIYO. The Emperor is only eight years old, he asks—Nun where are you taking me?—You were born the leader of ten thousand carriages of war, but now your good fortune has ended. First face the east …
Bid farewell to the great shrine at Ise …
KAGEKIYO. Then face the west and pray to be carried off to the Western Pure Land, then pray to Amitabha Buddha. The Emperor puts his dear little hands together … (KAGEKIYO sobs.) Now at last the nun holds him in her arms, saying—Beneath the waves there is another capital …
Preparing to enter the sea a thousand fathoms deep my eyes how can they see this.
KAGEKIYO. I cry out and crush my own eyes, my own eyes I …
Crush.
The children are silent and still. They are looking at Kagekiyo’s eyes. Kagekiyo forces himself to be calm.
KAGEKIYO. Well then, the story of a brave war … At the Yumi river in Yashima, the reverse oar, the fan target.
The children look bored. Once more they frolic and dance.
Snow streams down hail streams down.
CHILDREN. The boat’s come, the boat’s come!
The children scatter in the direction of the boat, which is not visible.
It falls and it falls and still it falls how I wish it would clear how I wish it would clear.
Kagekiyo walks off, holding the biwa to his chest. Two boat-women pass him. It is clear from their expressions that they are waiting for customers.
The fish climb the wind blows striking the bucket-drum striking the bucket-drum.
Two travelers come from the boat and tease the boat-women.
SECOND CUSTOMER. I’ve heard that if one passes by Tomo offshore the cypress-wood fans beckon…
FIRST BOAT-WOMAN. Tomo’s most famous product—boat-women …
FIRST CUSTOMER. Those cypress-wood fans …
FIRST BOAT-WOMAN. Adorn the cabins on the boats …
FIRST CUSTOMER. The scarlet collars …
SECOND BOAT-WOMAN. Are wrapped around our waists … (She lifts the hem of her kimono and displays her legs.)
SECOND CUSTOMER. Boat-women are …
Pillowed on the waves rocking in a small boat lovely and swaying.
FIRST CUSTOMER. Out on the sea, in this snow?
Snow does not grow deeper on the sea only the thoughts of women grow deeper.
FIRST CUSTOMER. Perhaps to see the cypress-wood fans …
SECOND BOAT-WOMAN. Let’s go to the boat—it’s that one, that boat there.
SECOND CUSTOMER. Oh, it’s cold. (He looks at the boat and shivers.)
FIRST BOAT-WOMAN. Shall we warm you with our snow-white skin?
SECOND CUSTOMER. Snow-white skin, did you say? It looks like goose-flesh to me, like the skin of a shark come up from the sea. I was amazed when I heard that Heike women had become prostitutes—what a story …
FIRST CUSTOMER. This ugly-faced Heike crab, this spider-prostitute …
SECOND BOAT-WOMAN. Weren’t the Heike pinched the way a Heike crab pinches?
FIRST BOAT-WOMAN. Weren’t the Heike embraced the way a spider-prostitute embraces?
FIRST, SECOND CUSTOMERS. Oh! How frightening!
The fish climb the wind blows striking the bucket-drum striking the bucket-drum how I wish it would clear how I wish it would clear.
The second customer clowns about with the second boat-woman, and the two of them board the boat. The second boat-woman seems filled with power as she rows out. The first customer draws closer to the first boat-woman, and they walk off stage right.
Murasaki’s clothing is disheveled, but she has not lost her elegant and refined air. She chases the third man onto the stage.
In the inlet at Tomo women divers fish for bream in the sea at Tomo women divers draw in their nets they are so dear they are so dear.
THIRD MAN. I told you my wife and kids are waiting, and you …
MURASAKI. (Taking the man’s hand in hers.) Even my breasts are cold in this snow …
THIRD MAN. Which one? (He puts his hands on MURASAKI’S breasts.)
MURASAKI. Even these breasts sleep in pairs, on this lonely chest of mine … (She leans coquettishly on him.)
THIRD MAN. There’s nothing odd in that—you’ve got two.
The man shakes Murasaki off and starts to go. Murasaki runs after him.
For their sisters women divers fish for bream for their sisters women divers draw in their nets they are so dear they are so dear.
MURASAKI. I’m not missing anything. When we’re doing it …
THIRD MAN. You certainly aren’t missing anything—you’re beautiful. (He clasps her to him suddenly, without thinking, then hesitates.) You’re a Heike prostitute, aren’t you?
MURASAKI. Yes. After the Heike clan was defeated at Yashima, when everyone was escaping—I was left behind at the harbor in Tomo …
THIRD MAN. How old were you then?
MURASAKI. Why—I must have been … (She thinks.)
THIRD MAN. You can’t say, can you. That mouthless strait …
MURASAKI. Won’t you stay? Have a little rest in a strait with no mouth, be left with no regrets.
THIRD MAN. Your mouth and your lies have both gotten good. Yes, it seems the women are all Heike throw-aways.
MURASAKI. You think the baby bird is pretty, and it wants to be held by the daddy bird …
The third man gives Murasaki some money. Murasaki makes a face which shows that she thinks the amount too little. The man starts to go. Murasaki runs after him, surprised.
THIRD MAN. Look, I’m giving it to you.
MURASAKI. No, no—I don’t need people’s charity …
THIRD MAN. Let me go …
MURASAKI. I may have fallen in the world, but I don’t beg.
THIRD MAN. You are a beggar, and you’re stubborn—it doesn’t go well with your face. Watch it—I’ll throw you into the sea!
The man pushes Murasaki down.
MURASAKI. Well, of all the rough … I don’t beg. I may sell my body, but I don’t beg.
Murasaki tries once more to stop the man. He shakes her off and pushes her down.
THIRD MAN. Grrh.
Kagekiyo pushes Murasaki and the third man apart and stands between them.
KAGEKIYO. (To THIRD MAN.) Don’t be violent.
THIRD MAN. Yeah, which one of us is being violent? My family’s seen that the boat has come in.
The man hurries off.
Kagekiyo feels for Murasaki with his hands, shields her …
KAGEKIYO. Are you hurt? Have your sleeves come unsewn? Oh, your hands are cold.
MURASAKI. (Shaking him off, repulsed.) A blind man will sew up the torn stitches for me?
KAGEKIYO. With a needle of the heart, tears in the heart. I’ll sew them.
MURASAKI. The road we walk in this world is a mountain of needles—be very careful where you step.
Murasaki picks
up the money the man gave her earlier and gives it to Kagekiyo.
There was a beggar here earlier.
Murasaki leaves, making a show of her slovenliness.
In the inlet at Tomo women divers fish for bream in the sea at Tomo women divers draw in their nets they are so dear they are so dear.
KAGEKIYO. HOW strange—that woman seemed … She seemed to be a Heike, one of those left behind. (He sits.) The beautiful Heike have died out—I’ll play for the wanderers.
He plays his biwa.
Oh how precious the preciousness of this day.
Murasaki returns, seemingly possessed by the sound of the biwa. Then, feeling as though her heart has been pierced, slowly remembering the last dance her mother taught her, she begins to dance.
This life the life of a drop of dew yet still I chance to meet the joy of this day.
At last Kagekiyo stands and begins to dance. They fall naturally into line.
The sadness of this day yesterday a dream tomorrow an illusion today in reality here on my lap the biwa I pluck and make sing whose child listens it is my own good child oh how precious the preciousness of this day.
Kagekiyo and Murasaki realize that they are parent and child. They want to tell one another their names, but they are unable to—they go on dancing. Snow falls so heavily that the two figures can no longer be seen.
I try to tell you who I am but I am filled with shame shall I say shall I not say oh father oh daughter and so together they dance together they dance a chance meeting is itself the fruit of an eternal bond.
Kagekiyo moves as if to shake himself free of Murasaki, then clasps the biwa to his chest and cries. Murasaki places her own long cloak over Kagekiyo’s shoulders and then continues dancing, seemingly even more possessed than before. She continues to stand in the fiercely falling snow.
(Curtain.)
Eighteen Poems
Djuna Barnes
—Edited by Phillip Herring and Osias Stutman
EDITORS’ NOTE
THE POEMS BY DJUNA Barnes included in this selection have never before been published. All but one of these remarkable works were written at 5 Patchin Place in New York’s Greenwich Village, where she lived from 1940 until her death in 1982. With the exception of “Portrait of a Lady Walking,” which can be dated circa 1924-26, these poems were composed after Barnes published her play The Antiphon (1958) and Selected Works (1962).
Most of the poems date from 1964-80, and reflect Barnes’s ongoing interest in the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, especially John Donne. The poems went through many drafts, since Barnes preferred to start afresh each morning rather than returning to yesterday’s corrected version of whatever poem or poetic cycles she was currently working on. For the last twenty years of her life she wrote in this revisionary manner. Some clean and presumably final drafts were typed by Barnes and her friend Hank O’Neal from 1978 to 1981, and all of the originals are now part of the Barnes archive at the University of Maryland, College Park. We have maintained in our transcriptions of the following eighteen poems all of Barnes’s original punctuation and spellings.
Known primarily as the author of the lesbian tragic novel Nightwood, in the latter years of her life she thought of herself as a poet. These highly polished jewels in the hard, intellectual, rhymed language of the Metaphysical poets may finally bring to Djuna Barnes the attention she deserves as a fascinating, if difficult, Modernist poet who took an older tradition and worked it magnificently to her purpose.
PORTRAIT OF A LADY WALKING
In the North birds feather a long wind.
She is beautiful.
The Fall lays ice on the lemon’s rind.
Her slow ways are attendant on the dark mind.
The frost sets a brittle stillness on the pool.
Onto the cool short pile of the wet grass
Birds drop like a shower of glass.
LAMENT FOR WRETCHES, EVERY ONE
As whales by dolphins slashed, bring on a school
Of lesser fins to passenger the blood,
So comes my general man, both my priest, and hood
To ask, “who drank baptism down in nothing flat?
Who cut the comb in half to see it quick
With buzzing backsides, quartered out of cells?
And sick
And staggered regents staling pedestals?”
I replied:
“What heard of Darkness oysters in your tide?”
DISCONTENT
Truly, when I pause and stop to think
That with an hempen rope I’ll spool to bed,
Aware that tears of mourners on the brink
Are merely spindrift of the shaken head,
Then, as the squirrel quarreling his nut,
I with my winter store am in dispute,
For none will burrow in to share my bread.
WHEN THE KISSING FLESH IS GONE
When the kissing flesh is gone
And tooth to tooth true lovers lie
Idly snarling, bone to bone,
Will you term that ecstasy?
Nay, but love in chancery.
In the last extremity,
Duelling eternity,
Love lies down in clemency,
Compounding rogue fidelity!
DERELICTION
Does the inch-worm on the Atlas mourn
That last acre its not inched upon?
As does the rascal, when to grass he’s toed
Thunder in the basket, mowed to measure;
The four last things begun:
Leviathan
Thrashing on the banks of kingdomcome.
DERELICTION (Augusta said)
Augusta said:
“Had I the foresight of the mole
I’d have taken my paps underground
Papp’d and staked like a coachmans coat.
There suckled darkness, and the goat;
As women must,
Who suckle dust.”
DERELICTION AND VIRGIN SPRING
ITEM:
Tell where is the kissing-crust
Where three labours met; the trine
Father, Son and Ghost?
Not a crumb.
Who broke the bonding of that loaf apart?
Who drank the wine?
Who took the peel
And turn’d the Host on his own heel?
Who made the sign?
Who is the moocher with the down turn’d thumb?
Who capsized Jehovah in a ditch
At Gath?
Leviathan
Thrashing on the wharf at kingdomcome?
SATIRES (Satires of Don Pasquin)
Man cannot purge his body of its theme,
As does the silk-worm ferry forth her thread,
High Commander, tell me what is man
And what surmise?
Is breastmilk in the lamentation yet?
O predacious victim of the wheel,
St. Catherine of roses, turn your gaze
Where woe is;
Purge the body of its dread,
As does the bombace from her furnace heave
To weave a shroud to metamorphose in?
To re-consider in
What bolt of havoc holds your dread?
On what cast of terror are you fed?
VERSE
Should any ask “what it is to be in love
With one you cannot slough, she being young?”
What should it be, we answer, who can prove
The falling of the milk-tooth on the tongue,
Is autumn in the mouth enough.
LAUGHING LAMENTATIONS OF DAN CORBEAU
Observe where Corbeau hops, touches his fly
With cold, fastidious alarm, and piping forth
Flora, with the sweet sap-sucking cry
“What, kiss the famine of an old man’s mouth!”
The party’s “game” as mystery is posed in truth
“High” as a partridge on a peg
is “high.”
“Rather will I eat my fists in youth!”
So let them go, for God’s sake; I’d as lief
She get my wisdom on a shorter tooth,
Nor shall I “eat my other hand for grief.”
LAUGHING LAMENTATIONS
Lord, what is man, that he was once your brag?
A spawling job of flesh with off-set thumb.
Grown so insolent he lifts his leg
Upon the running sessions of his tomb.
And where’s the black purse was his mother’s bag?
(It coined his faces, both sides, good and ill,)
Why round his neck it bangs for begging bread,
Her Merry thought? The skipjack of the kill.
THE BO TREE
All children, at some time, and hand in hand
Go to the woods to be un-parented
And ministered in the leaves. The frozen bole
The spirit kicks in spring, will that amend
The winter in the hearse? Pick from his hole
The daub was Caesar? Will the damned
Who rake the sparrows bones the fires burn black,
Find the pilgrim down, a tree stuck in their back?
DISCANT (There should be gardens)
There should be gardens for old men
To twitter in;
Boscage too, for Madames, sports
For memory, poor puff-balls of a day;
Soundless virginals laid on to ply
Suet to eat, and herbs to make them spin
Cuttle and costard on a plate, loud hay
To start the gnat—and then
Mulberry, to re-consider in—
Resign? repent?
Observe the haute meander of pavan
Radical Shadows Page 8
