A FABLE



(Flamenco music.  RAND , played by Coleridge,atop a pedestal.  BRENNAN, played by Wordsworth,is sweeping the stage with a broom.)

RAND
            A Poem unrooted from its Book
            Is a plant removed from native soil
            And stuck down in the fantastic landscape
            Of fable.  The plant is a miniature
            Ecosystem, the Poem a miniature Book. 

BRENNAN
            Rand, tell me a story.

RAND
            There was an oak tree on a lofty crag,
            There was a broom below.
            A storm. 

BRENNAN
            That was beautiful.  Tell me another.

RAND
            There were two men who wrote a Book
            And called themselves one Man . . .

(Enter COLERIDGE, played by Rand,and WORDSWORTH, played by Brennan, dancing and handclapping.  Following a great flourish of dance and handclap full of adolescent angst, COLERIDGE collapses, dead.  WORDSWORTH continues to dance and handclap.)

WORDSWORTH
            Better dead than juvenile.

RAND
            . . . and so it was.  And the moral of the story?

BRENNAN
            Death?  I can live with that.





A SUPERIOR GARDEN



( RAND and BRENNAN riding rocking horses.  Women dressed as NUNS float across the rear of the stage, occasionally stopping to light or blow out one of the many candles present.)

BRENNAN
            A garden of the dead?

RAND
            Consider two types of garden.
            One: the common flower garden.  Rose and lily.
            Two: the cemetery.
            A superior, more useful garden.

BRENNAN
            Graveyards are creepy.

RAND
            True.  But they are a good place to put flowers.

            (Rocking harder.)

            The flower a blossom of mourning, and mourning
            Remembrance.  The truth of afterlife, Heaven,
            Is bull.  The graveyard the body's best
            Hope at immortality.  At least, to live
            In memory.  Death is to be future and past.
            I am a baby.  I am pre-born.  I am
            A very old man.  The dirt of my grave has been patted down.

BRENNAN
            So where's your grave?

RAND
            The Book.  The Book is grave, is graveyard,
            The Book is death, decay, the Book is grave
            And epitaph, remembrance and monument, erection
            Of monument, ruin and poem and death
            And monument of quiet, ruin, death, epitaph.

BRENNAN
            You said erection!

RAND
            The Book is the well-tended garden
            Of the dead.  It is a superior garden.
            It is a superior grave.  A superior grave
            Contains multiple bodies.  Bodies intimately engaged
            In death.  Bodies in death classified
            Under a single name.  Flowers fade while the stone remains.
            The sexton piles bones.

BRENNAN
            You said bone!  What's a sexton?

( RAND ceases his rocking.  BRENNAN rocks harder.  The NUNS begin to sing a hymn, each holding a lighted candle beneath her face.)





KA-BOOM

(Dancers, in hard hats and overalls, perform a synchronized dance in hip-hop style.  They exit to reveal the stage constructed to resemble a blasting site.  WORDSWORTH is spray-painting the word Author on a giant rock, around which can be seen bundles of dynamite attached to a fuse which leads to an old-type blasting box, the T of the lever raised and ready to plunge, where RAND and BRENNAN stand.)

BRENNAN
            Is the dust-smoke ghost?

RAND
            Blasting is a stranger
            Art than constructing.

BRENNAN
            What is the remainder
            Of the equation?

RAND
            Diagrammatic graffiti on stone.  Perverted
            Pleasure-act exploded.

BRENNAN
            I blast away?

RAND
            My body pocked with dark
            Matter projectile.  Stopgap emergency.
            I've put on some distance

BRENNAN
            Mistaken breath of my chest

RAND
            Heap of me unfinished

BRENNAN
            Here

RAND
            The bright

(As BRENNAN prepares to plunge the lever the dancers enter, again obscuring the scene.  This time they perform a sort of ballet.)





WHERE IS THE CAPTAIN?



(The Santa Maria.  MONA LISA, as played by Kate Winslet, stands at the prow, arms spread as if flying.  BRENNAN stands on deck, with spyglass.  He dictates to MONA LISA, who repeats after him.  CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS is nowhere to be seen.)

BRENNAN
            Dear Rand,

            Apology for the book debacle.
            Heat of mind a jalapeno seed.
            Nature's hatchet double-bladed.
            However happily epigrammatic in duration, still a blight when face-to-face.
            Boy but is keen-felt.
            If books remain erupted gladly I to their prior standing will return them.
            Let it not be too-late.
            I say let it not be while thinking let it be.
            Let books find new order.
            Spines in strange-to-the-eye arrangement.
            Read different.
            Lines drawn between dots reveal unexpected objects and animals.
            As if spirit-life.
            Mine anger told me mine spirit I am escaping.
            Said spirit, You.
            Specific moment of wide unearthly feeling.
            I pick through plotted particulars.
            Understand if you want we to meet no more.
            You say good riddance.
            Thank you in advance for preceding past with future.
            Wasn't it all along your intent, I believe.

            Passed into face,

            Brennan

 

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apocryphaltext Vol. 3

4 poems by david brennan

David Brennan's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pank, Beeswax, h_ngm_n and other journals.  His ebook Whiskerhead Dreams the Dread Chicken (BlazeVOX Books) can be read at blazevox.org.  He lives and teaches in western Virginia.