Either dimly lighted or just offstage.
“We Fined God” serves as prelude, to be performed by an anonymous, unseen couple or chorus of female and male voices (recruited from the audience?).
Some few hours before a sloe-black sky would feel the prick of the crescent moon, she called my attention to the far ridge, where a blue mist rose over the leafless wood.
For a moment, we discussed the source: smoke? reflection of an unseen pond? but we couldn’t muster the energy – we didn’t amount to enough to care to know.
We had gotten nowhere in no time at all. A luckier couple, much less lovers, would have made up a story out of the blue, delighted by the emergence of Spring, at last.
All we could do was bounce memories off one another, carefully cut and pasted for the telling:
I noted where I first saw a scarlet tanager, but not the girl who was with me then, whose areolae were paler than scarlet; and she pointed to the bench by the pond, smiling in silence at the memory of what went down her last time there.
Ten days into April, some months since our first date, we parted.
It was the year we fined God for keeping Winter out past the date it was due back in the library of the mind, in the universal imagination.
Lights come up.
1st voice:
The great good luck of my life is that I was six years old before there was a TV set in my childhood home. As a consequence, my head became home to a giant imagination, as I wondered where everybody went and what everybody did when they weren’t doing what needed to be done to properly grow a poet.
Instead of an idiot box or boob tube, as TV was called in its infancy, in our living room there was an item of furniture, half the size of a couch, that contained both radio and record player.
With my parents doing double duty by also being my pre-school teachers, I learned to walk and talk to the accompaniment of records and songs on the radio. Records ranged from bagpipes and brass bands to boogie woogie; radio songs I remember include Sixteen Tons and How Much is that Doggie in the Window.
Talk that wasn’t addressed to me, went right over my head, and sounded as good as the records and songs as it flew by me. And soon enough, talk that was addressed to me failed to sink in because my imagination was in a hurry to develop a mind of its own.
Home Schoolin’
Since I was nearly five years old when
delivered to school by immigrant parents
who speak English with the artfulness and
precision of the masters and who maintain
their allegiance to the principles of Christianity
Even as I teeter toward the establishment of
a regime that matches my spontaneity,
school, with its tolerance of stupid talk
and its adherence to un-golden rules,
was a bad fit for me.
Fade to dark.
2nd voice: who, what, why, when, how someone arrives at a place where the consumption of poems feels or seems the best thing to do, next.
Fade to dark.
When the lights go up, the two voices perform “Overheard at VerseFest.”
He: Hi
She: Hi.
He: Wanna go to the shore?
She: What store? What for?
He: Not the store, the shore, you know, the beach?
She: Oh, the beach, I love the beach!
He: Well then, do you wanna go?
She: Now?
He: Saturday, or Sunday, whenever is convenient.
She: Sunday could work, but why?
He: I want to test a theory, verify that an image works.
She: What theory?
He: I was thinking that poems, ideas for poems, poem notions roll onto the
conscious mind like surf onto shore.
She: Can’t you Google it – verify it there?
He: Nope, this is original research, needs to be done in situ!
She: In situ? Where’s that, Hawaii?
He: Yeah, no, In situ means on the site…
She: I know, just teasing…
He: I thought so…
She: So, what’s your theory again?
He: Well. all this material for poems rolls up – like the surf, depositing image after
Image on the shore – on the beach of the mind.
She: Yeah, OK, I can see that…
He: What I want to look at though, is what goes back with the undertow. I can Imagine stuff rolling up on shore, but I need to See how much gets taken away.
She: Oh – like two steps forward and one step back?
He: Yeah, something like that…
She: Well there’s a Western Swing class here tomorrow night.
He: All right, let’s do that, then..
The End
The expected takeaway from the performance is that poetry itself is the gift – when arranged in poetic fashion, language is capable of providing private solace or relief, as well as public entertainment, which itself often leads to something new and beautiful. Poetry erases loneliness, even when read or written alone.
Even though the voices STILL are confused at what the other is saying, they’re satisfied enough to keep talking – and we all know what that can lead to. (repeat 1st voice!)
Nobody ever gets it right all the time; but poetry hopes to get close enough to the hot, wet, beating heart of the matter often enough to be invited back to try again!
Dave Read