The Soul-Splitter

A rich re-telling of a Chinese ghost story in play form.

                          the gods corrupt
us; though I never suffered their abrupt
seductions, shattering advances, I
too bear their sensual lightnings in my thigh.
I too am dying.
                      ----- Phaedra, Robert Lowell, Racine


DAUGHTER
Human beings are to be pitied!

OFFICER
You've found that out!

DAUGHTER
Yes. Life is hard, but love conquers all.
Come and see!
                     ----- A Dream Play, August Strindberg



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SCENE 1
     [Mrs Chang's visiting room.]

MRS CHANG
Dear daughter, Chien-nu, always tapping at the mirror,
always sighing and saying, with infinite regret repeating:
"When will I be taller! Breasts, come out now,
now is the time for Wang Wen to arrive,
dropping his glory into my life under the plum trees,
transfiguring the house-garden with romance."
She does not know what she says! She is not ready
for the love of a man, his mysterious speeches
and strange allure. She is not ready to look
such high excitement in the eye. Not yet, not yet.

     [Enter SERVANT.]

SERVANT
Mrs Chang! Mrs Chang! There is a stranger at the gate,
and he has the look of trouble about his person.
He is smiling and whistling at the strangest things.
Chou-chou the old pup came running up to him, biting his silks,
and he smiled as if he were being licked and kissed!

MRS CHANG
He is too happy, for certain, whoever he is.
The years are too evil for this lightness of heart.
Fetch him in. I will discover his fancy plans
and spit them out too; like these plum pits.

[MRS CHANG spits out the pit of a plum she's been chewing
into a lacquer dish. SERVANT escorts WANG WEN in.
CHOU-CHOU is chew-chewing his pant leg.]

SERVANT
I am announcing a Mr Wang Wen.

WANG WEN
The seven austerity-slackening courtesies
to you, dear lady. What name's this rascal go by
anyway: Nevah-been-fed?

MRS CHANG
                           The thousand fanning how-dos
due to a houseguest to you, Wang Wen.

WANG WEN
Thank you. May the bones of your ancestors
never be played upon by your enemies.

MRS CHANG
Thank you. Why are you here, Wang Wen?
I did not call you out yet. But like
an irreligious owl who forgets his devotions
in the dark, you come blinking to my house
in this early daylight.

WANG WEN
                              The early thaw this year
is uncustomarily gracious to travellers,
and I am anxious to see the delights of the world.
Even the most studious owl must sauce
his books with sunshine now and again.
And I was soon to be on my way to the imperial
examinations anyway. So....

MRS CHANG
What have you got there, under that sly smile?
What are you doing grinning and walking in here
as if you owned the town?

WANG WEN
I own myself. I guess that makes me happy.
Not a lot to worry about, if you've only got yourself.

MRS CHANG
You are a poor boy, now that your father's dead.
Your inheritance fell to your brother,
who is off in the shipping business in Peking.

WANG WEN
I guess I came here to increase my sorrows
and collect a wife promised to me before my birth.
---No matter, I'll honor my familial obligations.

[CHIEN NU pokes her head into the doorway.
She watches silently.]

MRS CHANG
Your politeness covers discourtesy.
Stand there. Be silent.

WANG WEN
     [Aside, looking at CHIEN NU.]
I am watching her. Is she seeing my heart?

CHIEN NU
I keep my careful eye upon his hands,
not regarding his face of moonlight
unless he is turning away. This way,
I keep my modesty. Oh, if he could only see
how my thighs and eyes are wet with sick waiting
beneath my embroidered silks and blue eyelids.

MRS CHANG
     [Aside, to SERVANT.]
What is to be done! His family's penniless!

SERVANT
He's got a cocky tilt to his head.
The proverb is: Be bold in all things.

MRS CHANG
He's that, alright.

WANG WEN
Eyes, eyes, how shall you master this brightness?

CHIEN NU
Each day, I shall end my day swaled and scented
in his dark, consoling silks. Yes!

MRS CHANG
     [Sharply.]
And you have not passed your exams yet. Is that right?

WANG WEN
The great mystery is before me.

CHIEN NU
I am so tenderly made, if he looks at me again
with those oceans of his eyes, I shall dissolve!

WANG WEN
     [Closing his eyes.]
Eyes shut, mastering their darkness....

MRS CHANG
Everything's too uncertain. My first obligation
is to marry my daughter well and increase
the family wealth.

WANG WEN
     [Not bearing to look at CHIEN NU.]
How is your daughter, Mrs Chang? She looks well.

MRS CHANG
Chien Nu! Take Wang Wen to see the garden.

CHIEN NU
Yes mother, right away. Please, sir, this way.

     [Exit WANG WEN and CHIEN NU.]

MRS CHANG
I've decided. No marriage until he passes his exams.

SERVANT
When he has the prize, he will be a prize,
and Peking's embroidered ladies,
who buzz the examination's chambers
and with beetle-brows overlook the winner's list
will attack his new carriage on the instant in the street
like june bugs on a gorse bush, madam.

MRS CHANG
Still, I've decided. No turning back now.
What else can I do, hmm? Damn it all.
It's not easy being a widow
and running things. You try it.

SERVANT
I am but a poor servant, and have no
great household to run.


MRS CHANG
Nor any prospect to get one, like that.
Stop your stropping back-talk, at once,
or you could have the grandest roof of all
--- under the stars.

SERVANT
I am silence.




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SCENE 2
     [The garden.]

CHIEN NU
Our green garden is not so dour
as my widowed mom.

WANG WEN
However dour, I see she is yet adorned
by her daughter's heightened blossoms.

CHIEN NU
The love-eschewing yew breeds darkly in her eyes.
Her stunted, wounded earth is gashed wide alive
only to welcome cold coffins now.
Even the bearded pinecone's winter seeds
(accustomed to bring forth life in harshest seasons)
are blown ungerminating across her lap of snow.
She'll have no other children besides myself.
Her dirt heart's gone under with the onion,
spaded sourly beneath life's sweetness,
layered away from our mutual doing light of day
with bitter remembrance for her only company.

WANG WEN
There seems some wrongness in those so aloof
(as a maiden bee that flies highest for her mating)
that they from Nature's sweet open treasuries
can receive no honied cup of succor
for their peculiar thirst, although the honey
is such that thrives the busy, common hive.

CHIEN NU
This sensual glade is yet a pleasant garden,
and for all the world I know none greener
to foster loving endurance and courage
beyond the razing, raving times of grief.
When summer's hushen heats proclaim
the healthful virtues of this quiet place
loud as whispers, where this sun-bussed bank
of daylilies blows, such tiny trumpeting
as sounds out of the azeleas' muted throats
soundlessly aglow almost, until shy silence
herself does seem to break her convent quiet
and speak her matin prayers into the dawn,
such triumphant trumpeting, I say,
---though silent as ashes else---
in my willing heart does find a hearing ear.
And their beauty, their happy silent song
I carry with me where I go.

WANG WEN
                                   Strange story!
What's the shadowy history of this
horn-crowed garden abrupt with trumpets
that find their choir in silences? This garden
that in busy brightness is so loud against my eyes
it shouts the rainbow back to a single color!
What has caused this prismatic miracle to occur
back in some dark stretch of place that I
can't see the reasons now, and plain as burning,
of how this singing garden takes the light so sunningly
it outdoes the petalled flamings of the sun?

CHIEN NU
Here my father's buried, a spirit interred,
that gives to common dirt a holy aura
(for they say a dear death makes questioning Life
more lucid for that afterlife's backlighting).
Many cold gone dawns ago he broke his back
upon his miller's waterfalling wheel
and stopped their grinding gears with his grinding
agonies. He screamed, as like to pierce the sky
in which he hung, harmed and helpless above us....
And then he came pulled back to ground by six men
(forever calm and sage in peaceful death
as in roaring life he was agitated)
to lay like a firstling leaf inside a unplucked bean
in his lacquered box beside those tumbledown graves.
O he is not so restless in perfect heaven now
as to come ghosting down among us again
in any form of visitation. No, we never
see him at all, although I'd swear some acre of light
in this garden knows him. And so my mom,
guideless, assumes her more awful guises,
frowning at strangers, and repeating worn advice
like a pastor's long-memoried homilies,
and stales her conversation. What masks we wear
to visor our eyes from frank sunlight,
hiding in our pretending skins! So she buries
all her old hopes in old rituals again
and again, inferring comfort from repetition.

WANG WEN
Lead me; let's walk a narrow furrow farther on
unseeded by death.

CHIEN NU
                             Every inching step of life
takes some print of poison as it goes--

WANG WEN
And yet here what's buried does come again,
and fragrantly inherits the air
that closets us about.

CHIEN NU
                              True. The crocus bud
no matter how often shovelled under
always erects itself to find the spring again
in fresh-gilded progeny, and stalks the new air
first of all the flowers, although it is
the earliest dier too.

WANG WEN
                                   First in death
and first in life renewed.

CHIEN NU
                                      All mirror-backwards,
this procession that might be as easy
as life to life, and life to life again,
lacking blank death's heavy intercession.
But come; over there the weighty willow hangs
in lofty ease, and makes even bouyant Spring
an occassion for yawns and couches.

WANG WEN
It seems a pleasant way away.

CHIEN NU
Is it always the singing lesson of a fable
to aria forth what artless nature shows us plain,
and double in mirror-mangling singing
the simple doings of simple nature thus?

WANG WEN
If we could tell ourselves a story
as awesome as a sun-headed daylily peers
(and in humble glory out-judges the wildflower field
that hedges its soft nobility, adjourning
all the meadow's mellow whispers with its sigh,
in easiest happiness as ignorant as joy)
so that merely to look upon its open hues
or hear it shush the air that waggles it
steals the laurel from our painters
and leaves our poor panting poets breathless,
why then, I guess we could fable our existence
from a syllable, history roses with new scents,
charm the sun to darkness with a black chant,
river mysteries from a melting stone
that first grew soft to hear us sigh,
or any other catalog of impossiblities make true
by the plangent puffing out of our sole breaths
in the self-interrupted tossing cough of talk....
well, then we'd be a god and garden
unto ourselves, and sunder thunder
from its scariness with our kisses,
make peace with the twisting agonies of death,
know that all roads led home again,
and never stir an inch, or desire aught,
but that we already had it, and in quantity,
in ourselves in this our place-- complete.

CHIEN NU
I myself am nearly told over in your telling
and nearly convinced that such a power
as lingers in the daylily has touched your lips
and put some unused tongue of its mightiness
into your very speech. I would that I
could curl into your mouth and find myself
reinvented in your breath. Speak again
and I'll bend an ear to know if sassing nature
does not silence herself to hear you.

CHIEN NU[WANG WEN breaks off a willow branch,
begins playing with it as CHIEN NU talks.]

WANG WEN
Chien Nu....hold this wily willow-wand
a moment between your fingers.

CHIEN NU
I will. But why I should, I don't know.

WANG WEN
I myself will with continual grip
apprehend this distant end, and between us
will arise a rainbow of but one greeny hue
touching us both.

CHIEN NU
                             Yes, I feel your hand, almost,
within the tender writhings of the wand;
it is a curious connection.

WANG WEN
And one in which nature is complicit,
for she herself first shot forth the tie
drawbridged between us by our different pressures.
I would swear I have your pulse's measure
in motion through the sap.

CHIEN NU
                                            I too, almost,
would swear the same.

WANG WEN
                                          And here we are,
without abridgement, our whole selves entire
and with all the enterprise of our minds engaged
using nature for our metaphor, our touch
in transformation changing what is into what
was not. How like a pair of autumn-dusted trees
stand we, whose overlapping branches
by continual nearness of quiet years
in shared garden shade have grown together,
making of two tough roots one gentle bough.

CHIEN NU
And that bough....

MRS CHANG
     [From offstage.]
Chien Nu!!

[The lovers are inclining toward each other, but at MRS CHANG's cry
they accidentally break the willow switch.]

CHIEN NU
                         ....happy.




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SCENE 3
     [Chien Nu's room, and the open road.]

CHIEN NU
Since our hands have parted, bitter fingers
curl open as smoke, as empty. Vanishing
to the horizon, my heart sighs for our hour in the garden,
past times and harnessed laughter. Vanity!
He shall not come. Not today. In the spring wind,
the double gate knocks against itself:
stone and iron, a terrible clanging.
Wound about like the ivy, my hopes and sorrows
together; grievy and drenched, I slip
to stillness, my hempen shoes go mossy,
and I wait.

     [We see WANG WEN walking along the road, to his boat.]

WANG WEN
Sorrowful plum-leaves grieve the road red;
black branches mourn at their lightness.
If only my arms were weighted-down with Chien-nu!
How truly sad I am only a great architect can know.
Planning one thing, I accomplish another,
my designs become dusty memories of unlived utopias.
Expectation cancels out reality, and I cannot
be where I am. And yet, I must depart.
Desolate sounds scurry out of these absences around me.
My feet follow the road like strangers,
each following the other out of mistaken hope
that one or the other knows where they are going.

     [We see CHIEN NU in her room, mooning for WANG WEN.]

CHIEN NU
My heart is entranced with its own beating,
my pulse is supported by thunder. Seeking love,
I have doubled my sorrows. Now I shall try a remedy.
Think of small things and narrow ways, my heart.
Don't look at the sky too long, as if
it were another shade of his eyes. Seek corners,
confer with baby spiders about their miniature hangings,
white portraits in obscure places. Fold into a chair
and let the armrests serve as Earth's four corners.
Let your nose out-scope the horizon. Quiet, quiet.
Oh, to anchor my meditation in a sparrow's house
and not among the wide world of his wanderings!
My heart, be still. Condense, contract your fistings---
titter and hymn with the mouse, modestly,
and all will be well. And yet, and yet....
I know; I will drink this yew-berry brew
[[nurse had gathered in black lace stockings         [[don't use]]
with knowledgeable fingers plucking only
the thundercloud-colored ones at midnight,]] and sleep,
and have no dreams, for this potion kills imagination.

     [We see WANG WEN in his boat, paddling upstream.]

WANG WEN
Deep abiding flies from my heart.
My white feet wander where they will.
The ghost of Chien-nu visits the marshlands,
her heaven's breath a freshness among all these rank things,
her absent eye a beknighting diamond
lighting the cage of stars that falls upon this heavy dusk,
and I am lonely when her spirit stirs.
How can this be happening? Why this aching
and betrayal of joy and justice?
Has my imperial wish to succeed and be a bride's man
clouded the clear lake we were to sail,
fracturing its clarity with this turbid dirtiness?

[In CHIEN NU's room, we see a second CHIEN NU
arise beside her bed, in ghostlike solemnity, and pace in peace
through the window into the quiet countryside.]




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SCENE 4

[WANG WEN is drinking wine on the river, bitterly missing
CHIEN NU. Her soul appears, they talk and embrace, they make
wild love, and she dissolves as he goes to drunken sleep. He is wild
with grief, but is overcome by desperate exhaustion.]

WANG WEN
Whatever's in immortality, that's not in this wine
I declare insufficient to the causes of infinity.
     [Pause.]
The time is gone a little by when I,
a studious boy, threw down curious books
to pull a blackeyed yew-berry through my hook
and perditioned afternoons to pull up a trout.
Night herself is losing her closeness, her darkness
as I remember yesterday afternoon, which glows
how strongly in my lit recollection. How simply
she took her limpid tea to her tipping lips!
     [Pulling on his fishing-line.]
My silvertongued hook pulls at the blackeyed yew-berries,
dipping in triple-time to get a dripping fish.
     [Hoists up an active trout.]
As hard to hold as a girl's attention!
Chien-Nu! My muscular wriggler, how I have tried-on
your whapping thighs in my whole heart's thought
a million searing times already! Chien-Nu!

CHIEN NU
Wang Wen! How callous your hands looked
as you left my side, your face open
to the open window. How quickly you have
leapt away! How barren my days and hours since,
nothing in the garden to delight me, no walk
but your steps echo after mine, empty and emptier.
Now I stand, all soul, and move past riverbanks,
sashaying through skirting mountains as if they
were no more than magic lantern images
thrown up in the theatre. Ah! If I
don't make it to the riverbank by dawn--
how far will Wang Wen have floated!
When will he race back to our sandlot on horseback,
the wind prideful in his hair?
Silent, faint, high and quick,
my ghost-steps dissolve to frosted banks,
walking the river's edge in tamped moonlight.
A thousand mountains, a thousand streams,
dash past my marauding eye, and are gone.
Heart, heart, remembering the sad eyes that parted
pair by pair, like gingying birds to distant nests.
Sweat pearls against my aghast face, I race
to his silent boat on the moorland,
my hair gone a thousand ways in the air-stream.
My faint feet are bruised with running.
What tavern is he carousing at on the Chi Huai?
Sudden horses, calm voices, night, night,
indistinct commotion opens beyond these willows.
My heart yatters at me-- speed, speed!
Is that you beyond this solemn grove I've come to,
beating on a ch'in board and dropping soaked lines for fish?
Here will I crouch, and hear what the west wind brings.
Insinuations of my love-- float through this torpor!
Grass at the sand's edge is slick with frost,
my green skirt hangs water-weighted to the ground,
my steps heavy and drenched slip to stillness,
my hempen shoes go mossy, and I wait.

     [The sound of a ch'in board being beaten is heard.]

WANG WEN
How like a picture is everything now to me!
The bleak river at twilight, moon and moon in sky
and on the river's flat: Heaven over my sad head
and under my slow prow. How like an icy jar
brimmed with water, a jade without flaw.
On the far bank, a wild duck, green head and blue wing,
whirls alone his evening colors.
Dry vines tangle the darkness, old trees,
ancient figures in the mid-dark, ravens accosting the dusk.
Listen: the solo note of a flute, or is it
a girl singing? Her tender timbre is like that
of my Chien Nu. Is it you, Chien Nu?
Chien Nu? Ah! how idle is my heart in this black.

CHIEN NU
     [Singing.]
Hear the lonely whippoorwill
he sounds too blue to fly;
if my heart can't touch poor whippoorwill,
I'll be so blue I'll die.

Softly, softly, whippoorwill,
oh can you hear
on the valley's blue and lonely rill,
softly, softly, whippoorwill,
my voice to yours is coming, dear,
no need for sadness now.

     [We hear CHIEN NU singing.]

WANG WEN
Talking to ourselves, we hear another;
introspection resolves into remembrance....
my tongue cannot tell a tale, but is caught
kissing you-- the whole object and instance
of its incessant wagging.

CHIEN NU
A thousand feelings have a thousand voices,
and all of them sigh away like you on this river to me.
Nearing happiness, we confront blunt dangers;
sharpening our hearts for ecstasy, we bleed raw tears.
Whichever way I turn, asleep or wandering wakeful
your immortal countenance confronts me;
I hail my nursemaid: Wang Wen! Talking to mom,
I spot you laughing over her shoulder, making faces.
When any feet approach me, first I hear your sandals,
the sho-wood resounds with your coming
and my heart knocks hollowly in time to the traffic.
When I dash my face to my pillow in bitter disappointment,
your face is already there, and I can smell you;
Deep in my pillow you comfort the fresh onrush
of my distorted tears.

WANG WEN
Is there some spirit left in flesh that I
feel the winds' chill run thru my bones so,
a march of air upon my skin, and a march
of upright gooseflesh answering?

     [CHIEN NU comes in sight of WANG WEN.]

WANG WEN
Why are you here, and how have you come, dear thing,
out of what darkness is this vision resolved
flooding my fouled obscurities with light?
I cannot see you without thinking myself
too soon blessed with daylight; I who had thought it
shut and dungeoned from his sensible being
in the eons since our leave-taking.
How, how, how, how, Chien-nu, are you here?

CHIEN NU
A desire asks me
                  I seek not the reason;
when a love that held me fast pulls me after,
I go, were it even to damnation.

WANG WEN
But Chien Nu, how are you here?

CHIEN NU
Do not ask again, for I myself do not know.

     [They kiss, etc., etc.]

WANG WEN
Why this unspeakable clarity
                   in the light's playfulness?
Pleasure's leisure and simple lease
thus rapturously released?


CHIEN NU
Our bodies fell into confusion when we asked for love.
Felt apparitions of some drumming weather
smote our bones, and now we arise
skin-lashed from these matted grasses;

WANG WEN
Desire came, swift to enter,
                   turbulent at egress,
sessions' cessation, the met wept hands
palpitant, tired,


CHIEN NU
                 worn smiles renewing laughter;


WANG WEN
our thrown robes unioned on the peach-branch,
     impatient for our bodies' return.

CHIEN NU
     [Satiated.]
Now I know my body's body, that shape wherein
my imagination molds me. How does a tree
hold itself up against the blue immensity?
The watchword of root and branch, bole and soul
is this: I dream myself a tree, and therefore
come my buds pushing sugared airs away,
sap and barking back hurl from seedling on
to ancient limb and lightning'd hulk
by the mute power of the dream's suasiveness,
not otherwise. Were I to blink and think myself
an agile fish nervous beneath the agate stream,
a mere sixty white years, a death, a body's lapse,
and I would wake re-sheathed in those glamours
of new flesh, and gaze with sideswiped eyes
at a world submerged; water-reeds would chasten
my agitations; my slim fins would cling
to air only for the dim length of a breath
held, and I would die fossilized in the muds,
my skeleton the dream's only remembrance
of having been dreamed. Oh spirit, oh self!
Give yourself the will to recall such
a strength of dreaming when unconsciousness sets
thee in thy sick-bed body again. Victim
of this pernicious illusion never be again,
nor drape your longings on so frail a hope
as flesh.

     [CHIEN NU sighs and disappears.]

WANG WEN
Ah! how I am thrown, a rose into a furnace,
and disappear in ashes. Eyes, curse yourselves
to have gazed so longingly on love, to be
revenged by its absence to this nullity
of night! Hands, clump and curl, wither back
to stumps of somethings, to have touched
a radiance you are now denied. Oh every sense
is by its saturation overthrown and burned
when that fulfillment, though all unexpected first,
slackens, and we roil lost in our new amplitudes
of searing wants. My love's contestless softness
sharpens every rearing dagger of that hurt
which stabs me now. Uncoil, heavy soul!
and into this shattering night disperse,
as a campfire's disturbed smoke goes
from greyness to nothingness beneath dull stars
for your final gladness. Cheating Time has put
all my tossing future in his bone sack
and knotted the lot with the garrote-wire
remembrance. Absence inflicts!
Courage comes not to these empty hands
nor recalling eloquence to these lips---
Oh nothing do I know, I know,
except what from me slips;
when even my shapeless shadow from my body
falls, dissolute as night, how shall I
rise to you, Chien-Nu, my shut light?


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SCENE 5

     [Chien-Nu, stirring awake in her sick-bed.]

CHIEN NU
A miraculous moment....

NURSEMAID
Here's gingsing, a spice to brighten wide
recalcitrant eyes and ease them into day;
and here's tea, to uncrumple a stomach
fed on nothing but a fever-pallet's madnesses
--Ach! what a ferocious crowd of hours
you've spent in the naked solitude of sleep!

CHIEN NU
An exquisite minute....

NURSEMAID
Three days a-bed; not even in my howling youth
did I maelstrom the bedsheets so!

CHIEN NU
There was a storm pouring toward us
from the horizon's crescent when I passed
from daylight to my private dark.

NURSEMAID
And your hair is all a storm of tangles, lady,
as if the city of your virginity had been sacked
by handsome Mongols all these starry days thru.
Well, there's a story I could maybe tell you:
but dark eyes keep their secrets and twinkles
longest, honey. Ach, enough!

CHIEN NU
                                          Has the storm
harmed aught in the orchard?

NURSEMAID
                                             Swill to the level
of the laurel-daubed inner decoration
on this proffered cup, my bug. There, there!
Your hair's a little less like a wild galaxy now.

CHIEN NU
Is it day or night out? Whenever my eyes
close out the cloistering tapestries of this room,
and these hanging gazelles bound beyond
my being's business for one second,
I see him, I see Wang Wen, stretched in ecstasy
on a pallid riverbank, the near grass
melted back from its frost-freshness
by some plenitude of his dreaming tears.
Ah! Wang Wen! This love-sickness is killing,
my crushed chest an aching whirlpool
among your bruise-black torrents.

     [MRS CHANG enters.]

MRS CHANG
Do not drown in such nothings, darling.
I know we treasured imperial hopes of his appointment;
such apportionment may be ours one day,
or it may not. Sigh away your breath too long,
lithesome one, and one day it shan't come back.

NURSEMAID
Oh, my poor possum; upside down, and unconscious
with dreaming when the day is busy beneath you!

CHIEN NU
I cannot stand to lie unalive without him
one drugged moment longer! The cures I need are stronger,
ladies, than the soups and roots you proffer me.
Wild lightnings in dragging air, Wang Wen!
Come touch forever what cannot be possessed!
Caress an indomitable thigh, and tongue
a woman's heart damned to interminable daylight
without you. Oh, those words, those crow-moans,
without you! Where's the root of a longing
purloined from the gods? I thieve ecstasies
from your too-absent face, Wang Wen!

MRS CHANG
Appalling, this bitterness. [Aside.] Nursemaid,
double her dosage. I'm scramming to get
the old priest. He'll tie her spirit in a knot
so she cleaves here, and to us, once again.

NURSEMAID
Oh, my poor possum.

CHIEN NU
Since our hands met in a last goodbye, all's vanity
and is vain; sight, that comprehends him not,
vanity, ears that hear him not,
vanity, touch that touches him not, nor is touched
by him in sweet return, vanity;
eyes that close to a darkness absent him,
vanity, eyes that open on a world unseeing of him,
vanity, lips that open and kiss him not,
vanity, my dumb tongue that may taste no remembrance
of him, vanity, vanity, vanity, vanity.
Every sense is emptiness without him,
and yet Bhudda-enlightenment escapes me!
Sure the bitterest cheat in life is leave-taking.
The thrush knocks not against the abyss of night
when her lover dove is snared in the hunter's net
with one note more of longing, than I.
When I speak, my breath is limp,
no force follows my utterance, nor am I heard.
Inside myself, I am too weak to concentrate.
When I lie down, I cannot fall together enough
to even sleep. Fine wine is bread paste
against my palette; spiced things come to my tongue
tasteless, not even their effervesce survives.
Medicine's effectless; no cure emancipates me.
I know well when this hidden ill began,
when his face evaporated from my approaches,
I dreamed, and his arms held me not,
I fell to the ground, hard on a tilted hip,
and he was gone. If I am to be well again,
it will not be until full sight of him
is restored to me; my sundered senses re-soldered,
my million divisions viced to singleness and glued.
One minute, I am sheer lead, nailed to the bed,
the next instant, I am floating over the roof,
viewing ruined landscapes that contain not him.
Next, all is clear, I am myself again,
my body my body--- then all is confusion again,
I float unroofed, rootless, aghast in terrible airs,
black winds, endless night, stretched agony,
my unattached spirit searches past each infinity
blisses get mixed with heart-stabs, ecstasies moil
with rotten longings, diamonds flash to ashes
in my uninhabited chest, I seek, and seek again,
invisible, fragrant, dispersed, all Eye and no eye,
and I cannot tell the Heaven from the Earth.

     [CHIEN NU falls asleep.]

MRS CHANG
Child! Wake up!

CHIEN NU
Sick already, what new sickness wakes me to appall?
Is it my death? Come, black charger,
and let the dark thunder of your monsterous hooves
consume my aching soul away! I am faint,
faint, a disappearing ink under thy trim nib,
and am nearly cancelled from the lists of life.
This flustering weakness that I feel
can be nothing else than sweet Death hurrying near,
kneeling to take his incisioning kiss.

MRS CHANG
The priest is here; he's to heal your soul.

CHIEN NU
And if my soul is elsewhere, on what
shall he lay a hand to effect a cure?

MRS CHANG
I send for Wang Wen. I'll send somebody
to ask him to come back. Pass or fail,
I'll have him come here. Perhaps seeing him
will fix you up.

CHIEN NU
Too late for your regret, your repentance, Mrs Chang.
Death has made me his mistress, and I am charmed
a little by is forthright solemnity; he's a sad child
holding forth his one cherished clump of posies,
how could I refuse him?

MRS CHANG
                                             Survive, child!
He laughed at everything, and now
to see how you grieve and wither. It's, well,
its sore to me.

CHIEN NU
I close my eyes and find happiness.
I see him.
Wang Wen!

PRIEST
                       Stop it, child!
You are not to talk this way and aggravate your case.
Until Wang Wen is returned to the precinct,
you must rest and let others pray for you.

CHIEN NU
I see from your grave habiliments, Mr Priest,
that you have endured a thousand deaths, a thousand ends,
held the hands of mourners by the ditch-edge
until tiredness brought oblivion to mourning;
what's one more slip-up, one less human remaining
still all a-stir above the dust that engulfs us?

PRIEST
Dominae sanctum, tortoise purposum.

CHIEN NU
I am touched with a burning hand;
My life is in my mouth, my mouth ingests the sky.
Love falls to sickness in this wicked world,
like yesterday's drunk-high, asleep under the spring willow,
like cattails a-whirl over the meadow-path,
swallows lofting the east wind, vaulting the pavilion
small as childhood beneath them. I am young
and I am cast away. I can't recover myself.
Who cares about one's youth when one is in possession
of it, even if one is throwing it away?
Perfect days go shunting blindly by;
my longing blossoms darkly, sadness increases,
frost on the loved bud, blight against beauty.
The larks offer a most charming intensity,
their lyric chunks against a wood head, my own;
Nature delights herself in display, not me.
Simple sounds startle my sorrowful heart.
Let me die today, avenging grief
by shortening its tortures. Let me die
while Spring is whistling its merriment outside
and my argent soul may follow awhile
fleets of flying flowers.

PRIEST
Dominae sanctum, prolixus verbaenum, verbosus.

CHIEN NU
I am struck down, if I am struck down,
half human, half a ghost.
Oh, go away, and let me sleep.

 Top^


****


LAST SCENE

WANG WEN
I sit, and with concentrated brush put my flung tongues
on the calligraphy paper fluttering under my flat palm here.
Soon I shall pass or fail these travailing exams.
My conscience is scrupulous as the wax that hold the wick,
a condensing tightness of melting colors
hungering themselves liquidly around a flame.
What shall be the outcome of all this light and smoke?
Total happiness, or misery unendurable?
All holds to its purpose; my mind is firm
and my hand turns to this effort alone.
I shall not wander from my scholarly concentration
nor discourse with any darting dreams of Chien Nu
while I make this exam cubicle my ruminating room.
All thoughts, marshall to mastery! Confucian mysteries
sing! Knowledge hard-won and encoded,
see here, chirrup when I carol you!

     [CHIEN NU appears.]

CHIEN NU
Come and burn with might and immenseness!
Throw down your books, your lives, and fly!
This empyrean stream invites an everlasting life,
an aching socket for transcendental fire.
Come, come, my one, my desire, my flame and fame,
eternity echoes emptily for me without your name!

WANG WEN
Chien Nu!

CHIEN NU
Look, your hand is cramped with knowledge,
your future life a tense battle of expectations,
myself prime among them. Help me throw
both your hand and your hurt away forever.

WANG WEN
Chien Nu, you must tell me, how are you here?

CHIEN NU
I remember the river. I came. I am all
at my spirit's lifeless bidding now, and have
but one hanging body's fragment of myself
dying abed back home. My body's dying,
immolated in a fever; it was too weak a thing
to touch so strong a desire as mine for long.
My insistent spirit discards its lilac casing
and soon will blossom against the gasping stars alone.

WANG WEN
To die, to cease. You ask this of me,
you invite me to my own destruction?
In such  a hurricaning leavetaking, love,
what simple willow wand could stand assured
that it would whip back to the mate that left it
amid such hurried circumstance and rush of death,
in such an overwhelming wind?

CHIEN NU
None, my love.

WANG WEN
None. None, none at all?

CHIEN NU
No, my love. Not a single assurance
may slipstream from my ghost-mouth now,
all drawn to you and the truth. And yet,
I ask. Come to me, die to me, my love.

WANG WEN
My body's a tissue against wishes so strong!

CHIEN NU
Then flash it to a thinness of ashes
and step these airs and fires your breath
insists I inhabit.

WANG WEN
There is an adoring glory in this agony
I embrace to taste you again, Chien Nu!

CHIEN NU
How can there be agony in a flesh dismissed
to inexistence by our twinning wishes?

WANG WEN
Is there a human summation in this finish?

CHIEN NU
Never, never, never, and never!
There's only us, silvertongue.

WANG WEN
Chien Nu....

CHIEN NU
But step to this certain synergy, sweet sweet one,
and all's a tasteless ecstasy tongue's absence makes.
Divine the radiant choice you uplift in joy to take
and all else swirls away from you into 'below.'
Here, first burn your exam. There. It is easy,
see how the light takes the paper?

WANG WEN
I see. I see.

CHIEN NU
So shall it be with you. A touch
of immortality and all your mundaner self
will wither and resolve to such a miniature sun.

WANG WEN
A sun. A day I shall never see.

CHIEN NU
A central intensity, certainly. My dear, here,
give me some dark lock of your hair.

     [WANG WEN cuts off some of his hair, hands it to CHIEN NU.]

CHIEN NU
A handful of raven's feathers. It is well.
There. See? It is you I burn here, and it
is not you. How easily will the rest fade
to this spirit's lightness. Do you see it going
up and up, the drifting smoke, while the flared hair
all vanishes at the line of the brightness?

WANG WEN
I see. I see.

CHIEN NU
Take this oil lamp's instructive illumination, now,
and pound it open upon the coarse reed mat.

WANG WEN
Shall I do this?

[WANG WEN takes the lamp and smashes it upon
the floor. All goes up in immense flames of destruction.]

WANG WEN
I can barely speak into this black brightness:
spoken floods of germinal loves choke black,
underlit by your wordless countenance's
unifying perfection. Look, the fire talks along
my ink-stained robe, all whispers and insistence;
its not too late to snuff them to deafness....
Oh, Chien Nu; oh I long to be with you!
And yet my heart, like a double-drawn bow
that has two arrows fletched and at the ready,
one marked white for life, and the other black as death,
I would live and die at once. I'd have both arrows
knock against the rattling target. Desires spike
my anxious limbs, and a rain of heavy nails,
my devouring fears, frame liaisons with this flesh,
entangling neurons against my spirit's
unbinding willingness to die, and so live with you.
Oh the strings are at my back, and I am prepared to fly
all ways at once.

CHIEN NU
                          All ways move my way always.

WANG WEN
My heart is dense. Why do these motivating tensions
of a free will tied to my body's estate
harp on their unknotting as my own loose end?
Must it be so?

CHIEN NU
                             Will it be so?

WANG WEN
Have your spirit's revelations becalmed
these aching wires of unknowing that burn within my chest,
pulled tight in anxious apprehension of my future state?
What will happen to me? Shall we meet on the other side,
to picnic upon that dread and death-rich turf
as carelessly as children after school? Or shall I
ravel back the whole, sweet fruit of my life to one
dark, shucked skull teneting an unhosed hole?
Shall I die to be free?

CHIEN NU
                                     Shall you?

WANG WEN
I do not know I do not know I do not know!

CHIEN NU
Move to me; as light must beckon light, I ask.
Dearest, the conflicting flames that your body throws
but backlight your more incandescent soul.
Sweet let the light I am indite the darkness
that your kneeling body crimps to feel; one touch
and all's a raiment rayed in peals of laughing light
where not one shadowed echo of a shadow goes.
Move to me; as cool water tempers a burning bone,
let my love's assuring peace and quiescent licence
touch some momentary quaver of yourself, sweetness,
where no fleshly feeling, precursing ecstacies, goes.
I gospel a romance that shuns infirm grace,
devouring reticent roses in its holy, violet spires
of spuming firelight once held in living vision's
sparse intensity. You die, and that which once
had moved and loved only on the lowly, sodden earth,
restless for intensities, now all in one glory
resides among the rafting fires of eternal shine.

WANG WEN
Have I done this?

CHIEN NU
Yes.


END



NOT USED:


The day fall off to badness, and time starts
to see its own bedraggled face in eternity.

Would you have all your golden corn
robbed, gnawed to a raw cob?



WANG WEN
Powerful over the prow of my unsteady self
came this unmastering impulse

MRS CHANG
Well, Wang Wen is on the road. He must return
with the imperial stamp on his lolling forehead,
or no Chien Nu.