SALT: a theater collage

SALT:  a theater collage

1st draft               June 18, 2019

Author's Notes:  SALT   ---The challenge is to transform poems written between 1970 and 2019 into something worth being dramatized.  I am writing a collage with a purpose, not a play.  The model is Tom Dent's Ritual Murder, which is anchored in/focused on actuality ----i.e., the inability of the human mind to account for all the factors contributing to despair, self-hatred, and so forth, produced in duration (time) and historically describable location (space, place).  Frustration and resilience  are central in SALT.

The weight of knowing

crushes the juice out of reason.

Assaulted  and condemned again and again, the mind can go bad; it can actually embrace more bad than good as it ponders that "often tomorrow make the mistake of becoming yesterday."

We'll see.  We'll hear.

(revised from September 9, 2017)

Abbreviations:

W = woman

M = man

W/M = duet

N = narrator, either male or female

Segment One

The stage:  Three chairs are arranged to form a triangle.  The narrator sits at the apex.  The woman is seated stage right; the man is seated stage left.  The woman and the man are talking to iPhones.

N:           Hush.  Hush.  Time is calling your name.

                Hush.  Time is calling.  Hush.

                Your name is calling you.  Hush.

                Be still.  Listen.

The woman and man reluctantly put the phones in their pockets.

All cast members:                           What you dream/  a trillion eons  / I am

                                                                a trillion eons  /  I am  / what you dream

                                                                I am  /what you dream  / a trillion eons

The narrator stands up and chants:

Should alien light with furious love smash

against the ancient Great Wall and time

become pixels to float in frantic design

down upon the face of worded Earth,

could vision make wiser speech of physics

or parse better, for you, for us

a bolder meaning of tragic magic beauty?

W:   Well, once upon time it was all tragic and magic….

M:   What happened?

N:           The weight of that question crushes wine out of reason.  Intentions, bad and good, tell us

                too, too often tomorrow makes the mistake of becoming yesterday.  The proof is the poem.

W/M:    Are you sure?  Literature lies.  It is not transparent.

M:           Are we in the Americas,  or in the USA,  or in a residual facsimile of an

                accident?

W:          In an accident, I suspect. Hard to decide.

The narrator stands up and chants:

The face challenges the mirror; the mirror, the face.

The space between has no wind, only an absence,

the given probabilities  gambling

in a vacuum of grief and alleged transgressions.

Sirens of moonset

become arrivals:

ancestors burning

signals of returning,

of unrequested volitions,

you deem, in jest,

a mystery of performing.

What you speak

a trillion eons

I am.

W:          That is proof? The best proof dressed-up words can offer?

M:           One instance of it, but listen.  I have a remembering …..

Sunday mornings:

Dad and I, dressed well,

went  from 1831 "I" Street

to Bladensburg Road

for the Washington Post: his puzzle,

my comics, his news,

 our leisured journey, my proud amusement.

We had class, I care to remember when I was five.

Sunday afternoons:

after the day's dinner---precisely at noon ---

Mother, Dad, and I

called on cousins or visited the zoo

or saw our reflections in Lincoln's pool

or made the most of fine weather

as Dad's camera imaged us

in black, grey, and white

to  preserve, even now, the gloss and grandeur of our lives.

We had class, I care to remember when I was five,

before circumstances railroaded us out of Eden,

deposited us to shock of home, the South,

demanding I give up mirage of freedom

and the fine nuances of the child I was

in exchange for chaos,

 resentment,  wisdom and fluent cursing,

for the fierce measures of the man I am

in a commonweal of fragments.

Old gods

purge grave logic

reverse the hearse

make life best death

in the bargain.

What you speak

a trillion eons

I am.

I am

a myth, lore in the digital mouths

of my enemies and truth

in the truth-telling  mouths

 of the literate few

who read my unique danger:

my face challenges the mirror; the mirror, my face.

The space between has no wind, only an absence,

the given probabilities  gambling

in a vacuum of grief and alleged transgressions.

The space is authority,

the unspeakable science.

Sirens of moonset

become arrivals:

ancestors burning

signals of returning,

of unrequested volitions,

I clearly assert myself

myself redeem and yet again redeem,

in mystery of performing.

What you speak

a trillion eons

I am.

W:          That's a slice of a man's  story, but I can go darker and deeper. I have ridden rainbows into and

                out of  holes, and  I have memory in my eyes  and scars all over  and ….

M:           Scars?  So, I reckon your story is full of ships and  flying Africans and

                pathological  Europeans and …

W:          When I have a story, it ain't  just about  them.  It's about us. It's about theft . It's about

                time, the theft of time…..one in particular….

Ole massa he was, lawd save us,

he was of a powerful terrifying passion

and poor Hetty

he stripped quite naked

and she but twenty

and five months pregnant

and he order her

tied up to a magnolia tree

Poor Hetty, he flogged her

like her was a dog

and hard as he could lick

both with cow whip and stick

and she, poor Hetty, was

all over streaming with blood

and her poor chap, him screaming in the belly

Ole massa he, devil damn him,

rest his arm and then beat

her again and again and again

like stubborn mule,

her back all chopped up

flesh and blood and she

but twenty, you know,

and five months pregnant

and her shrieks, them was terrible

and the comeout were

that poor Hetty be brought to bed

before her time

and delivery up a dead child

and  poor Hetty, she

seemed to recover out of labor

but her and him, massa and missus

flog Hetty aferwards

and Hetty body not strong

'fore long and her body, it and her limbs

swell up big

and she lay on a mat in the kitchen

till the water break out of her body.

She died.

All the slaves say

death was a good thing

for poor Hetty, but me, I cried for

her death.  And so full of horror

I could not stand to think

about it, but it would not go away

and is present to my mind everyday

M:           Your voice

                it's a magic thing, yes,

                yes, I must not forget

                how you got over

                deep rivers

                and cured your blues

                with natural rhythms.

Segment Two

N:           Salt -----

                When it rains, we pour

                wry libations.  We are salt.

                When summoned, we testify.

                We sprinkle ourselves with water

                that has holes in it.  The spaces left

                when it rains.  We pour silence to heal silence.

W:          Sure, you right. "Silence is golden," so they say,

                but it takes the noise of prayer to get  things done.

                My heart does magnify your wind

And my head rejoices in you my savior.

For you have annotated the low esteem

of your apostle; for, it is great,

from henceforth all hysteria

will call me blasted.

For you who are haughty

have done to me naughty things;

and ghostly is your name.

And your mendacity resides in them

who hear you from her story to history.

You have sown despair

with your hands; you have

scattered hubris

in the imagery of my soul.

You have desecrated the mighty

in their seats and rescued me from prevarication.

You have brained the rich

with good things; and the hungry,

you have sent to the garbage pails.

You have exalted me, your most obedient

serf, in remembrance of your mercy;

as you preached to my father,

Judas in the chariot, and to my spawn forever.

M:           I second that emotion.

                It's our mothers'  seasoning

                that gets things done:

                Once, we heard  a poet say

                of his mother ---

on a needful day
your terribleness troubles

the house like thunderclaps
ripping a Delta sky.

You gather a bushel of autumn,
run faith fingers over your threads.

Your needles of sunlight
worry a healing into history.

The ancient lady in your bones
memories out the quilts.

Her leafwork stitches spring
invisible at the seams.

You know winters
have designs to freeze our flesh.

Your preternatural covers
blithely summer us into dawn

W:        JAZZ   red pepper file gumbo

            the democracy of the combo

M:        JAZZ  old time/ now time religion

            give us now time / old time religion

N:        And ask not to be surprised

            the morning the volcanoes

            belch ash in your eyes

            belch ash in your eyes

            you couldn't have thought,

            but you did, but you did not think,

            but you should have , but you should

            have thought not to think

            justice could be a virgin forever

Author's Note:  The director must decide how to distribute these lines

In our youth, invisible empires

secretly granted us a wisdom of silence,

energy of tears to baptize spaces for our lives.

We navigated rainbows of dust,

linked by the crystals of fate

and discontinuous sparkling of joy.

Good morning, heartache, you always come again,

good evening, mindscape, our faith-bound friend,

good night, necessity, good night.

Yes, the fierce silence of prayer

guided our quest for sanctuary,

for a peace we bravely misunderstood.

Mississippi made us

photographs of ourselves

to accuse love and hate and chaos.

Water, our first memory,

the mother/father sea

that tempest for  tasting the salted fruits of trees.

Metaphysics of time

leaned us and learned us

to be tall pines in buckshot mud and sun-baked clay.

Bogus vocabularies crammed our mouths

as we shot the marbles  and jumped the ropes

of the troubles and hopes the folk saw fit to see.

Our photographs darkened

as our music drizzled Delta blues in our ears

and promises of jazz in our eyes.

Good morning, heartache, you always come again,

good evening, mindscape, our faith-bound friend,

good night, necessity, good night.

Owls in our brains

itemized the humanity of our rites,

voiced the sovereignty  of our questions.

Secure in being native daughter and native son

we trod our Mississippi roads, brave,  defiant, as now

when  I speak the sugar of your smile and inhale the incense of your genius.

W/M:    Descent into history.  Ascent into herstory.

                The going down is a coming up, yes,

                a confrontation with

                 entanglement of memory

                in terms of engagement.

The terms.  The engagement.

Author's Note: the director must decide how to distribute these lines.

movement one: genesis

it must have been something like

sheets of sound wrinkled

with riffs and scats,

the aftermath of a fierce night

breezing through the grits and gravy;

or something like a blind leviathan

squeezing through solid rock,

marking chaos in the water

when his lady of graveyard love went

turning tricks on the ocean’s bottom;

or something like a vision

so blazing basic, so gutbucket, so blessed

the lowdown blues flew out: jazz

jazz to Jackson and

dust to dawn and

words for John

it must have been something like

Farish Street in the bebop forties,

a ragtag holy ghost baptizing Mississippi

on an unexpected Sunday, a brilliant revelation

for Billie telling you about these foolish thing

back in your own backyard, angel eyes in the rose room,

Monk’s changing piano into horn because it was zero in the sun,

and around midnight there was nobody but you

to walk Parker and his jazz to Jackson;

yeah, brother, it must have been something

striking you like an eargasm,

a baritone ax laid into soprano wood,

live loving madly in hurting silence,

waiting to fingerpop this heathen air

with innovations of classical black

at decibles to wake the deaf, the dumb, and the dead;

because around midnight there was nobody but you

who dug whether race records were

lamentations or lynchings: jazz

jazz to Jackson and

sunset to dawn and

words for John

movement two: blues people in the corn

steal away, steal away, steal away

the heart blow/horn blow/drum drop

to bass/five-four time beat

making a one o’clock comeback creep

behind all that jazz

beat --- beepbeep  --- beat

steal way back to beginning

beginning

is the water

is the soul

is the source

is the foundation with my brothers

is Pharaoh jamming in the pyramid,

sketches of Spain for a night in Tunisia;

is MJQ, Tatum, Turrentine, Tyner,

the Jazz Messengers, messiahs, crusading

headhunters tracking down the mind

cause, Lord yes, all God’s people got sold

and who’da thought

owning rhythm was a crime like stealing a nickel

and snitching a dime, when we had coffers packed

with golden music and time, golden music and time

sliding from the flesh, the bone, honeysweet music;

them lollipopcicle people

and they sardine ships

(and no music to speak of)

they stole it all and sold it all

for wooden nickels, for frozen dimes: jazz

behind all that jazz

blues people in the corn, in the vale of cotton tears,

blues people in the corn,

waiting, waiting, waiting,

waiting in esoteric patience,

waiting to steal away,

steal away, steal away

soon as Miles runs down the voodoo avenue

with some jazz to Jackson

and pipes a private number

to call a tune for John

movement three: and this, John, is our new day

and this, John, is our new day.

never say goodbye to the blues that saw you through,

nor put down the spirituals and the salty sermonnettes

the drugs, the junkies, the jukebox juice, the sweat

and the pain of shelling hot peanuts, hot peanuts: jazz

and the jazz you gave to us

we give to you as jazz to Jackson and

because we really want to thank you

words for John

The Ending

N:           Hush.  Hush.  Time is calling your name.

                Hush.  Time is calling.  Hush.

                Your name is calling you.  Hush.

                Be still.  Listen.

Peace be still.

Be still peace.

Still be peace.

All cast members:                           What you dream/  a trillion eons  / I am

                                                                a trillion eons  /  I am  / what you dream

                                                                I am  /what you dream  / a trillion eons

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

June 18, 2019