U.S.A.

Words outlast deeds.
—Pindar

(for actors, chorus, guitar and flute)

I. The Victory Over Blood

Actor One:
This is the hour that turns my loneliness to books.
It is late March, when spring still
struggles out of winter’s white cocoon.
I get up to a morning of fog.
Sitting on the edge of the bed,
I look into the opaque room
and see how much dead space there is
on the mattress when you sleep alone.
I turn my head as if to follow a sudden sound,
and in the darkness of the hall I see his ghost
reaching for the bathroom light.
Just like a frosted ship that trails foam,
the gray of dawn half shows his wake of youth.
He pulls behind this foreign world the way
a bride trains veils of gauze and baby’s breath.
These are the tricks my eyes will play.
Why do I talk to his imaginary shape,
and see his eyes look up from pillows into light,
or follow how his hand fingers on my leg?
What are we doing here, alone in dreams?
Walking the neighborhood streets,
I think I see him on the corner just ahead.
He waits below a glimpse of alien sky,
unapproachable, like a lovely face in the subway.
Perhaps he sees the wild light that used to press
on prairie flowers between the glass cliffs of buildings.
Look at that woman waiting on the corner for a bus.
The light falls into shadows by the broken curb
just like the ash of disappointment from her eyes.


Actor Two:
Who can be trusted?
The poet, minting his own mouth-money,
the cold that holds with ice and won’t let go,
the stuttering young man who says, I do,
like those intent to cleave the wind apart?
Once, when his hair brushed my arm,
I felt such fire I had to look to see if I was burnt.
He looked at me with eyes that said,
Not there, inside, the burn is on your soul.
Look, I’m just one man.
Never could he see me as a white Siberia of spirit,
nor were my hands wrapped around a scythe,
mowing down blond fields of Soviet wheat.
But he, with that gulag absentmindedness,
and the perfume of bedrooms on his hands,
is the Stalin of love, and when he says I do,
he rewrites the history of our hearts.
I could be as far away as China for him now.
When Hsu Yu was offered the throne,
he felt the pollution of imperial ignorance,
and went to the river to wash out his ears.
Outside, the trees, like monks, accept the rain
that wraps their bark with sleeves of ice.
My master says that winter is the beauty of this place.

Chorus:
He still recalls the memory of a loss
the way the moon remembers rivers,
or wind upon the needles of a pine.
The shape of emptiness is like a breath,
frozen in ice, or the shadow of a balloon
hovering between his eyes and the sun.
It weighs nothing—why won’t it go away?
Hovering between his eyes and the sun,
frozen in ice, or the shadow of a balloon,
the shape of emptiness is like a breath,
or wind upon the needles of a pine.
The way the moon remembers rivers,
he still recalls the memory of a loss.

Flute and Guitar

II. The Victory Over Rings

Actor One:
In a dream my dead lover kisses my lips
and passes to my mouth a seed of jade.
This is the kiss of life that fires me.
It is Saturday morning. The sunshine spills inside
through half draped windows of last night.
Brilliant bands of dawn stripe my clothes.
The room grows warm with an influence of light.
I let myself fall to the space we see with eyes closed,
and am amazed how many trials have washed past,
and still I try to make some sense of his profile.
It took me twenty years to say the words.
In that long time I built a room of air.
It is an atom to the world of ordinary days,
yet in nothing, it is the island of my care.
I go there now and float, held up by tinsel
chains of dreams and scrawls of past desire.
See, light holds by something other than walls.
Gladly I dismiss the guards of personality.
Let them march away with all their rattling shields.
I am the king in this chamber of memory.
Washed clean by waterfalls of shade,
I sip the shallow pool of sleep, a nomad
listening for a breath: first his, then mine.
He may have me now as I always would be had.

Actor Two:
This nation is ordered so that we never
forge our chains into rings.
We never pledge to build a home,
or watch our photographs of vacations
assemble in a scrapbook by the fireplace.
At best we are like bats, hanging from our feet,
squeaking in the dark.
This is how we find ourselves in such a land,
searching the darkness of bars and allies,
tapping out a disco SOS,
stumbling into one another and then we slip away.
A man sits on the edge of an unfamiliar bed
while another man sleeps beside him.
The bedroom window is open
and the chatter from the street spills in.
He looks into space as if to find the threads
to weave a purpose together.
The moon is high above the trees
and he sees it in the window pane.
The man looks at his hands made pale blue
by light from the midnight moon,
and then he looks at the man asleep.
There is a ring around the moon.
So, quietly he slips into his clothes,
tightens the ring of his belt, and leaves.

Chorus:
If we try these things by love, what can we lose?
These are only arms, these are only legs.
If we try these things by love, what can we lose?
These are only lips, these are only hands.
There are so many chains and locks and ropes,
how can we get close, how can we get loose?
Who has the keys to turn back time or rags
to blot the age and weariness from face to face?
Into the ark they go, two by two, and you, who takes your hand,
even as a child whose hand needed to be taken.
Tell me, from all your learning, the lessons of your books.
We try these deeds by love. How can we lose?

Flute and Guitar


III. The Victory Over Flags

Actor One:
Walking the streets of the polyglot city,
I think I see him on the corner just ahead.
I rush across traffic and say,Wait! Here.
Then I lift the burden of separateness
from my heart and set it at his feet.
It is a dirigible of air,
bound by brass strappings of absence.
It weighs so little and so much.
I leave it there at his feet,
in the middle of the sidewalk,
and step away. I feel buoyed,
like a man walking on the moon,
bounding over mountains that never face the earth.
Who hears this minor note of urban life,
that leaves behind a simple telltale hum
like gym shoes dangling from an alley tree.
Afterwards, I wrote this out for him to read.
Just a rectangle of the dust remains,
where a book is missing from the shelf
of a cloistered library in the Umbrian hills.
Who is working spells with formulas of time,
wandering, and regret?
Once, I heard a report that a man
was seen standing in the street,
looking up and down at the solitary burden
left there by someone rumored to be a poet.
The man was speechless, just shaking his head.
Was it yes or was it no?
The flags of marriage flapped above like busy tongues.
Was he the one to stay? Was he the one to go?
The ashes fall like snow upon the patio of dreams.

Actor Two:
Architecture of vaudeville and baroque flowerpots,
Gothic stairs, cobblestones tarred over,
and on each block, gaping, toothless lots
where tongues of fire stuttered a previous eloquence.
A new generation is harvested now to rap and rhinestones,
fried chicken, salsa—of Africa and Mexico they sing,
like Nero they sing, as the city burns
with graffiti and crack, they sing.
And to the west, the great metaphor, California,
sends its tendrils to each suburban yard.
Blushing roses on trellises toss cliches
beside a barbecue and little cylinders of lard.
The dusty city slides along on grease.
It only whispers with its neon lips
about the children who abandoned it,
or how we built these walls of glass instead of quiet rooms.
Was it ever anything else but movement?
Our stories accumulate to reach the sky.
In the shadow of these slivers sent to heaven,
a young man counts his money from the midnight shift.
He spit into another mouth his salt,
and now collects his wage for rent and dull regrets.
Born from rotting rows of blistered flats,
a useless school, and a broken home
he dare not write the name that echoes in his ears.
Watch out, addicted to mindless music and media magic,
here come electric Visigoths about the gates of Rome.

Chorus:
The story of a man’s life may be told
by just a glance of eyes, a lisp, or gestures in the dark.
You have heard of reading between the lines.
There are no dictionaries for the words
we stumble over in those blank places.
Something as small as a kiss
may be remembered for a lifetime.
Let it fill a library with answers.
The Aztecs, whose kings washed in blood,
and sipped from bowls of chocolate,
were never converted to letters.
The emperor of one heart is just the same.
Dogs sniff after dogs.
Something light as a feather can undo a life.
Our wounded children bind themselves with words.
Who knows, that one so quick with arrows
may someday pace his lonely room above the lake.
The very silence like a curse he called on you
now makes him the stone illiterate.
He watches gulls that glide above the shore,
unable to say what lifts the lightest wing.

Flute and Guitar


IV. The Victory Over Earth

Actor One:
One zodiac follows another,
one season slips past unsuspected
until he notices a new tint to the leaves.
The sky is ever-changing, like the surface of the sea.
A shadow falls upon the shore; a pause,
a pattern tells him how more time has flown away.
He senses it, a rush of wind, and moments move,
letters pass to words, the mind struggles to apprehend,
gray, blue, green; clouds tumbling like thoughts against our eyes.
Look, Solomon Pavy died as a child, others lost limbs at Lapanto
or stopped seeing at forty-three, who is to say they are not complete
by a loss, what is the power of the present that it trumpets so?
He is married, she is pregnant, they are holy.
All others walk like zombies, must wear chalk,
hold their heads down low and contemplate the weeds.
We need not repeat the schoolroom nightmare, I am alone.
O foolish philosophy, what harm we do ourselves
with your tick-tock discipline.
Listen, there comes a melody upon the strings,
clouds disperse and scavengers spread their wings.
Actor Two:
The world of captive beasts is blind.
For these the days assemble
like old misers thumbing dumb gold,
for these captives, time is creased and stored,
put away like table linen on a shelf.
There is enough training, wild things cry,
Enough preparation, when will we see what we must take?
It is another dim, English day.
Like a falcon trained on leather gloves,
his beak polished with bone, feathers oiled,
he sets out to search the book stalls.
Shall he finger his way across some poet's Braille?
Does the moisture in the sky discourage sparrows?
Soon, when the air is dry, the flocks will migrate.
Then, the outlines of his eyes will be touched,
and he is pointed to the promise and let fly.
He leaves the leather gauntlet
to throw his talons at the sky.

Chorus:
A traveler asks,Where does fear come from?
Fear comes from clinging.
Fear comes from earth and what is made of earth.
Fear comes from all the clay that clogs our heart.
Fear comes from mirrors and all that mirrors mock.
Do not go in the house of mirrors.
There was a dream of an old house,
and all the land around was barren.
I am not the gay lover you want.
Those basement words, that graffiti blood,
cannot be whitewashed away.
Fear comes from walls.
Fear comes from words.
Even if I take this bag of bones into the street
and give it away, who would hold it in their arms?
Something else must stand up in its place.
If you cannot find a fellow traveler, go alone.
Do not travel with a fool.

Flute and Guitar



V. The Victory Over Plagues

Actor One:
The only act that conquers time is love.
Desire leaps across the cliffs of centuries.
I have his picture here.
I hardly know how long it’s been,
but always know I tried to earn
what never could be earned.
I had him in my mouth.
My tongue displays his salt.
His long fingers played me.
I am a guitar, I am a flute.
Now, it is night in the wide city,
and I do not know his address.
The plague moves pantherly from door to door.
Men move from room to room.
Portals are covered with wool and blood.
Out there, somewhere, the pin prick lights
mark out the flow of streets into the dark.
On the bank of that black river he has a house.
My mouth tastes of shadows.
I turn down the bed.
I have learned to live day by day
and to dream night by night.
I swallowed the pearl he gave me.
It is a light within my bones.
Look at all the words I have,
piled one on top another,
like stones within a wall
that guards a pasture from the world.
Won’t any of them do?
I need more light to read.

Actor Two:
When the only money is youth,
the old are beggars at the city gate.
I see my body and do not want to own it’s skin.
The favorites of the king ride past without a look.
Outside, lepers in sackcloth, ring bells before they go.
Crowned by circling crows, they eat their lips away,
remembering what it was to kiss and have been kissed.
They prophesy the California videos
where sunshine boys have days of naked bliss.
With mouths so full, they haven’t a word to say.
For a few dollars they splash out their white ropes.
I am poor and only practice how to hold him close again.
We won’t say much. Each one is silent for the other.

Chorus:
A choir sings among the toppled stones,
the ancient syllables of light from loam.
All that remains are memories and bones.
Come lightsome flesh, the voices call us home.
Where is victory in the face of flags?
Where is victory above the razor coral of rings?
Where is victory over blood?
Where is victory from the muddy teeth of earth?
The violin his father played was lost to floods.
The house his mother made in love burnt down.
Where is victory over all that makes a meal of eyes,
digests our hair, and turns the peach of youth to mold?
Where is victory in the face of all the ills that challenge love?
This we tell you, victory comes but not with drums,
not with flags nor rings nor castles,
not with pills nor coins nor jewels,
no, victory comes simply day by day.
Victory is the smallest thing we triumph past.
This is the record the angels write at the end of time:
Charity, Peace, Joy; there is no law against these.
Our voices sing among the toppled stones,
the ancient syllables of light from loam.
All that remains are books and bones.
Come lightsome flesh, the voices call us home.

Flute and Guitar



FIVE VICTORY ODES
by Robert Klein Engler
DIRECTED BY Floyd A. May

A Dramatic Reading Featuring:
Rob Amos, Randy Gresham, Luis Laurenzana
and Joe Plambeck MUSIC: Scott Dankert
—ONE NIGHT ONLY—
Thursday, June 14th at 7:30
Big Chicks—5024 N. Sheridan—Chicago
Free and Open to the Public