Memory Show

Characters:

Willa

Justin

Amelia

Male Chorus

Female Chorus

Note: Chorus roles can be divided between one or two males and one or two females.

Willa: (To audience) It was my first solo art show. I was the low man on the totem poll, so they gave me a Tuesday. The budget was small but at least I got to choose the food myself. I tried to pack as much symbolism into the hors d’oeuvres as possible.

Justin: (To audience) It was my wife who found the invitation to Willa’s art show, delivered to our home. My wife who booked the plane and the hotel.

Chorus/Wife: You haven’t seen this woman since what, high school? She always sends us thoughtful presents on Madelyn’s birthday. You’re going, game over. Wife wins fight before fight happens.

Justin: (Sigh) Yes Hon.

(to audience) Suddenly I found myself in a small downtown New York gallery, wondering exactly how I’d gotten there.

Willa: (To Justin) You want to know how you got here? How both of us did?

Justin: Um….(Implied: No, but you’re about to tell me anyway)

Willa: Justin and I—(points to him) That guy— began our adventure, winding slowly toward friendship, immediately following high school English class.

Justin: Ah, here we go. This memory.

Chorus/Teenage Willa: Hi, Justin.

Chorus/Teenage Justin: Hi…(searching for her name) Willa.

Chorus/Teenage Willa: May I speak to you?

Justin: (To Willa) Why would you ask such a silly question? We were already speaking!

Willa: Shhh. Let us talk! I mean, let teenage us talk!

Chorus/Teenage Justin: …Yes?

Chorus/Teenage Willa: I would very much like to be your friend.

Justin: (To Willa) We were about to end junior year. The timing, much like you, was odd.  

Willa: I know, right? And I knew it then, too.

Chorus/Teenage Willa: I know we don’t have unlimited time.

Willa: See? I’m a genius!

Justin: Yeah yeah, be quiet. Let yourself talk.

Chorus/Teenage Willa: I was thinking…can we please spend the summer getting to know each other? And also, I’m not asking you out.

Justin: Were you reading my mind?

Willa: Sort of. I was reading your face. I’m a visual artist. That which makes me crazy also makes me psychic.

Justin: This is getting confusing, this memory within a memory. I’m no longer sure to whom it belongs. Which one of us is speaking?

Willa: Oh. Right. (To audience) He wrote down his number and gave it to me.

Chorus/Teenage Justin: I’m pretty busy this summer. But we can hang out a few times, sure.

Justin: I thought, maybe she won’t pursue this. Maybe this will just be one of those things that are hinted at, but ultimately come to nothing.

Willa: Yeah right. As if I wouldn’t spend the next decade-plus pursuing you….

Justin: Pursuing me…

Chorus/Teenage Willa: Pursuing….

Chorus/Teenage Justin: Me…

Willa: But your friendship only, nothing more than that. “Nothing more than that,” what a silly phrase, as if friendship alone weren’t worth the world entire.

Justin: And now I’m here. At your art show.

Willa: Yes, and I’m glowing. For so many reasons. (pause) No, not that. Although I suppose I am pregnant in a way….pregnant with the origins of creation.

Justin: Before you go on one of your artsy abstract meta-rants…

Willa: (to audience) Oh man, he knows me so well!

Justin: Let’s center ourselves. At your art show—which my wife made me attend—could you tell how guilty I felt?

Willa: No, I figured you were just uncomfortable for the usual reasons. Unless I’m engaged or married to you, I tend to have that effect of men. (To Chorus/Husband) I love you, Baby! Thanks for putting up with me!

Chorus/Husband: Don’t mention it.

Justin: It wasn’t you. I mean it was, but…I should have invited you to my wedding. I should have sent you a picture of Madelyn before she was a year old.

Willa: I’m not angry. I love you. I’m so glad you’re here. Listen to me, I, I, I, it’s all about me, god, artists are insufferable. Oooh, wine!

Justin: (To audience) And that’s when things begin to get weird.

Willa: “Begin to”…I’m sorry, are we still sharing the same memory?

Justin: Go away.

Willa: What?

Justin: You aren’t here for this. You and your husband—

Willa: Fiancé, at this point.

Justin: You and Theodor are in the corner drinking wine and having some dorky conversation at this point.

Willa: …Yup, that sounds like my relationship. Excuse me. (Goes to Husband/Chorus)

(Amelia enters)

Amelia:  Justin?

Justin: Yes, how did you know? Are all the people at this art show obsessed me with me? (to audience) I don’t think I said that last part aloud. I really, really hope I didn’t.

Amelia: I recognized you from Willa’s portrait of you. It’s iconic, in its own right. One of her best, I would say.

Justin: Oh. Right. (To audience) Well good, then. That’s only mildly unsettling. (To Amelia) And your name is?

Amelia: Amelia Valeri.

Justin: I’ve heard of you.

(To audience)

Willa’s best friend from college. I’ve heard way too much about Amelia. And seeing her now, for the first time, there’s nothing wrong with this woman. But it was disconcerting to see, in person, someone Willa described as a saint, an angel, a goddess, her soul mate. I never imagined Amelia having actual human hair. It’s…shiny.  

(To Amelia)

Don’t you and Willa sometimes chastely kiss? How could anyone kiss you and keep it chaste? You’re carnality embodied.  And yet you’re…Metaphysically ethereal? Your sweat must be nectar. But harder, human. Flesh against mine is alchemy, branch against branch, we’ll make fire.

(To Willa)

Great, now I’m starting to sound like you.

Willa: Sorry.

Justin: (To audience)

No. I’m only ethereally attracted to Amelia. That’s all. She’s a painting I’m looking at too hard and my focus gets distorted. It has nothing to do with sex, I mean gender, I mean the sexuality of our genders. God, what is this, my first ever epileptic seizure?

Willa: They don’t make you so articulate.

Justin: Go back to talking to your husband.

Willa: You’re the boss. It’s only my art showing, but whatever.

Justin: Let me kiss you. Just once. Ten feet away from Willa, from her paintings, the hors d’oeuvres, and most importantly, miles away from my wife and daughter, in this safe space that can never actually exist.

Amelia: Sure, whatever, I’m like a gin and tonic past finding this weird. (They kiss, passionately)

Justin: Um….I have to go now. Willa, can you take over for awhile?

Willa: Dude, no problem, I got this.

Justin steps back into the Chorus area. Willa replaces him.

Willa: So?

Amelia: So what?

Willa: Justin! I can’t believe he came!

Amelia: Oh. Him.

Willa: Yeah. It’s seriously, I just, it’s, you know, it’s a dream come true, you two meeting.

Amelia: What a boring dream. Aim higher. Really, Willa, you have no ambition.

Willa: ….You know this is my art show, right? In New York? (pause) City?

Amelia: Certainly I do. I helped you pick the wine. Speaking of which….

(she walks back to the chorus)

Willa: (calling after her, desperately) I love you, Amelia!

(To audience) I did. And I do. There is no beginning of the end. The end has many beginnings. In hindsight, that might have been one of them. Either way, even now, it stings.

Justin: (Joining her)

I know, Willa. God. I know. (They embrace)

Willa:  (still in his arms) You did not embrace me then. Not until my wedding.

Justin: I couldn’t. I was too self-conscious about the erection I’m not entirely sure I had. Bad enough as a metaphor, but god forbid you’d think it was for you.

Willa: I wouldn’t have. I knew better than that. (pause) Why didn’t you tell me?

Justin: Tell you?

Willa: That you were in love with Amelia? After knowing her a minute? It took me a full five minutes to fall so deeply in love with her. I’m impressed with how quickly you caught on.

Justin: (horrified and impressed) My god, how did you…

Willa: Since we were sixteen or seventeen, whenever we’re in the same room, I’m aware of your motion. Attuned to your heartbeat, almost.

Justin: Oh. That’s not at all disturbing.

Willa: I know, right? Sorry. I feel your emotions but I’m still oblivious to sarcasm.

Pause

Justin: I didn’t tell you, because I guess I knew how happy you’d be. And I wasn’t…ready for intimacy on that level. Not with you.

Willa: I get it, Justin. I really do. (To Justin and audience) There is an odd, distinct sorrow that accompanies the best day of your life.

My two greatest non-sexual muses, one from high school, one from college, under the same roof in a room filled with art! My art! That’ll scratch the ego’s g spot.

Chorus/Husband: (Jokingly, deadpan) You know I’m standing right here.

Willa: Quiet Theodor, being my husband doesn’t give you the right to critique my inner monologue.

Chorus/Husband: Oh my sweet baby. Read the fine print.

Willa: OK moving on. Anyway, there’s a paradox to the best day of your life. It casts a shadow, it haunts you. My wedding, in contrast to my first showing, was painted in pastels. Lovely, of course, but the climax had passed.

(Lights change slightly. Chorus and Amelia fade into background.)

Justin: I never kissed Amelia. I called my wife instead. I listened to my daughter breathe, and in doing so remembered to breathe myself.

Willa: When you came to my wedding, did you think Amelia would be there?

Justin: I did not for a moment doubt it.

Willa: Our Amelia was alive when I took my vows. She had six months left before…well, before things got bad.

Justin: Do you think that we’re glamorizing her?

Willa: Oh, certainly. That’s what living people do.

Justin: Why do I love a woman I met once, briefly? In what world does that make sense?

Willa: I’m an artist, don’t ask me for logic.

Justin: I didn’t know her.

Willa: Did you cheat on your wife?

Justin: No, and now I never will. I mean…I never would have…Fuck me, life is complicated!

Willa: Aw, baby, I’ve been saying that for years.

Justin: Did you just call me baby?

Willa: Yes, but I meant it non-sexually. I call everybody baby, or sugarcrotch, don’t overthink it. Kidding.

Justin: (pause) Yeah so life is complicated. I love my wife, but the memory of kissing my friend’s friend haunts and warms me as if it were real.

Willa: But we are friends. And you came to my wedding. And my showing.

Justin: That part, yes. That part is real.

Willa: And at the day of my showing, my happiest day….

Justin: I remember where all your art was on the wall…my visual memory’s not usually so precise…

Willa: I clasped your hand between mine and said….

Justin: Willa. It took me almost a decade to be comfortable saying your name.

Willa: …Justin.

Justin: I love my wife, my daughter, your dead friend, and you, in that order…

Willa: Justin! (Implied: Be quiet!)

Justin: What?

Willa: (Holding his hand) Thank you for coming.

END

Alaina Hammond is a poet, playwright, fiction writer, and visual artist. Her poems, plays, short stories, philosophical essays, paintings, drawings and photographs have been published both online and in print. Publications include Spinozablue, Third Wednesday Magazine, [Alternate Route], Paddler Press, Verse-Virtual, Macrame Literary Journal, Sublunary Review, Quail Bell Magazine, Superpresent, Clockwise Cat, Ranger Magazine, Fowl Feathered Review, The Ravens Perch, 10 By 10 Flash, Waffle Fried, House of Arcanum, Synchronized Chaos, Well Read Magazine, Hidden Peak Press, Third Street Review, and Litbop.  @alainaheidelberger on Instagram. Playwright’s note: Memory show was first produced at Manhattan Repertory Theatre, January 2016. It starred Alaina Hammond as Willa, Michael Bordwell as Justin, London Griffith as Amelia/Female Chorus, and Dave Stishan as Male Chorus.

Playwright’s note: Memory show was first produced at Manhattan Repertory Theatre, January 2016. It starred Alaina Hammond as Willa, Michael Bordwell as Justin, London Griffith as Amelia/Female Chorus, and Dave Stishan as Male Chorus.

My older brother told me
Chuang Tzu knew all along
he wasn't a butterfly




That her cat was well-behaved
wasn't the kind of information
he was seeking




Poster of the most dangerous creatures
on the wall where he measured
himself




 The builder's boots
 at their ease
on the sunny porch




Nowadays
the shrine maidens are always
on their phones




Just in my lifetime
a man walked on the moon
and another pretended to bend a spoon




The time spent 
waiting for the governor to call
in a movie I saw before




Also the work of the cosmos
children chasing bubbles
in the sun




Hampering her graceful efforts
to move him off the topic
of spindle shells




He's writing the secret history of sock drawers
and looking for a little
light clerical work




Strolling the aisles of the Dollar Tree
I picked up a gold sparkle
on my wrist

On Umid Najjari’s Poetry

The Collection of Poems “PHOTO OF DARKNESS”

 “The sharpness of mind is never born in harmonious conditions” (Haruki Murakami).

If we look at the origin of someone’s poetry through that prism, then Umid Najjari would be its prominent representative. His literary description and narration confirm that he is a highly intellectual and artistically delicate poet. His poetry is not distant or alien and has no boundaries. His fragile written word has a mighty power of artistic creation, and this is exactly the impression given by the poems in his collection  Photo of Darkness.

Umid Najjari was born in 1989 in Tabriz – East Azerbaijan Province, in northwestern Iran. After completing his studies at Islamic Azad University of Tabriz (2016), he continued his postgraduate studies at Baku Eurasia University, Faculty of Philology in Azerbaijan. As a writer, journalist and translator, he published the books “The land of the birds” and “Beyond the walls”, which stand out in his work. His poems have been translated into many world languages and published in the USA, Canada, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Iraq, Georgia and many other countries. He is the winner of “Samad Behrangi” Award (2016) and “Ali bey Hoseinzadeh” Award (2019). He was awarded the “Mihai Eminescu” Award in 2022. He was awarded the International Prize “Medal Alexandre The Great” in 2022. Najjari has also been elected Vice-President of the BOGDANI international writers’ association, with headquarters in Brussels and Pristina. And he is an active member of the Turkic World Young Authors Association.

By combining life and literary experience, Najjari writes poetry that evokes inviolable sense of depth with his readers. Sometimes pointless  and ungenerous descriptions reveal the essence and and let us travel from apparently meaningless to the deep meaningful, from abstraction to real stronghold of events, and by its authenticity they attract the reader to explore further through his poems and to return to them again and again.

A poet of the original style, deep in himself, does not divide the past and the present as the two different spheres, but perceives them as equally dominant and represented with the same intensity in his life.

 There is no harmony between them, expressing deep emptiness and loneliness in his life:

“everything seen in a mirror is loneliness…” (the poem “A homeland as big as umbrella”).

There are many and diverse relationships present in the poem, from immeasurable love to immeasurable nostalgia.

As the themes of Najjari’s poetry, besides longing and helplessness ‘the shadow of longing enters us….sometimes the laughter is the last breath of crying’ (The Shadow of Longing), the poets draws  hints of tragedy in his descriptions – ‘sad black stones in cemeteries’ (The Shadow of tree) that sometimes  even have apocalyptic tones.

Night pains…

Darkness shot into his lap….

So we cannot fly …” (,, I Fire a Match”)  

(implication of despair, variation of sorrow and suffering, a step curled up in despair)

…

 ‘a pile of fire on the cross…’

Rebellious, unstoppable restlessness of fire is a picture of eternal movement, a world full of opposites, the scene of the constant struggle of opposing forces of light and darkness….. Heraclitus)

The light is a reflection of hope, and the frequent return to a night in poems reminds us of torturous reality, and various sides of dark forces and evil fate of the centuries…

His poetry weeps over the fate of the world, over darkness, without a stronghold of posterity. In his poem The Symphony of Separation he tries to find an escape in oblivion. The lack is strong (Telegram), passing through an awareness of freedom of choice and the need to live.

The poem Absurd mentions Zarathustra, the ancient philosopher, underlining his idea of the essence of our existence represented by the constant struggle between light and darkness, good and evil.

The unequal verses and intermittent rhythm of his poetry remind us of Mayakovsky’s writing. He even mentions him in the same poem by saying: ,,The side of Mayakovsky in my body hurts’, emphasizing the lyrical creation of the suicidal instinct and near death….

Above all the poet glorifies love, in various relations, as the most important and motivating thought in the essence of our being:

‘Open your hands, protect me from the winds, keep me from drying out my eyes….’ (‘They are all excuse’).

This is just one of the possible interpretations of Umid Najjari’s individual and extraordinary poetry.

                                      Andrejana Dvornić, professor and writer

                                      Belgrade, Serbia

Haruki Murakami* – 1Q84 (Book 1)

Poetry from Su Yun

1.攀桥花

你可知攀桥面对乌漆铁栅

你可知宿处不为天然泥崖

不留意鸟歌高不过喇叭

只在乎泥印密不过白花

你吻过泥板灰墙

告别他的掩夹

你拥上尖埃旧梁

还要展却枝丫

近看天色多日沉霞

不比前月胭华

近闻人声多言愁话

不比前时笑洽

指点轮辙辗过绒花

指点红灯笛鸣吹沙

你可见暗色言语人车深压

等待淡化

等待你描尘抹泥的白花

Creeping Bridge Flowers

Do you know you face ink-black iron bars

Do you know your bed’s not natural clay and stars

Heedless that birdsong fades beneath urban calls

Caring only that mud prints out bloom petals’ falls

You’ve kissed earthen boards and ashen walls goodbye

Released their sheltering hold with a sigh

You’ve embraced ancient beams dusted with time

Yet still unfold branches in their prime

Nearby skies hold sunset’s fading grace

Less fair than last month’s rosy face

Nearby voices whisper sorrow’s trace

Less sweet than former joy’s embrace

Watch wheel tracks crush velvet blooms below

Watch red lights and whistles stir dust’s flow

See you not how dark words, crowds, and cars oppress

Waiting to fade away

Waiting for your white flowers to cleanse time’s clay

Su Yun, whose works have been published in more than ten countries and who won the 2024 Guido Gozzano Apple Orchard Award in Italy.

 

Poetry from Qiyue

2.这些年

在雾中，天空被倾斜

这悔恨

无法命名的十年

这朦胧，这默

不能挑剔的十年

叹息或者叹讶

这凌乱，这夜

层叠着反复的这些年

这无序，这恋

我并不能找出遗忘的理由

月色正好，足够颠沛流离

These Years

Through the haze, the sky slants  

—this nameless ache—  

A decade dissolved in mist  

This muted world, this silence  

A decade too vast to judge  

Breath caught between sigh and marvel  

This tangle of shadows, this night  

Stacked like paper—all these layered years  

Disorder dressed as longing  

No reason justifies forgetting  

The moon pours its silver  

luminous enough to bear our wandering  

**Qiyue** (pen name), formerly known as **Yaoye**  

Born post-2000 | Member of Chongqing Fengdu County Writers Association  

Graduate:  

– Intermediate Poetry Class (7th term), Wangyue Yaji Public Welfare Poetry Academy

Poetry from Ding Yuze

3.水山

文/丁宇泽(7岁)

水山跟火山一样

又高又大

也能爆发

The Water Mountain

By Ding Yuze (7 years old)

The water mountain is just like a volcano,

Tall and huge.

And it can also erupt.

Poetry from Bai Ziwei

4.花朵

文/白子薇(10岁)

花朵有很多种

我最爱桃花

它在我家乡

桃花可以帮我看家乡

Flowers

By Bai Ziwei (10 years old)

There are many kinds of flowers.

I love peach blossoms the most.

They are in my hometown.

Peach blossoms can help me keep an eye on my hometown.

Poetry from Luo Yuxing

5.只是一颗糖

文/罗宇兴(9岁)

一颗糖的含义，是什么?

是一颗纯真的心，望着那飘扬的红旗。

一颗糖的含义，是什么?

是一位医生在抢救病人时，医生失去的生命。

Just a Piece of Candy

By Luo Yuxing (9 years old)

What is the meaning of a piece of candy?

It is a pure heart, gazing at the fluttering red flag.

What is the meaning of a piece of candy?

It is the life that a doctor loses while rescuing a patient.

Poetry from Xiao Shiqi

6.世界

文/肖世琦(10岁)

整个世界都是优美的

和平的

平等的

我喜欢这个世界

The World

By Xiao Shiqi (10 years old)

The whole world is beautiful,

Peaceful,

And equal.

I love this world

Poetry from Li Lvtao

7.牺牲

文/李吕涛(10岁)

军人最大的光荣是牺牲

他们不怕牺牲

只怕——

辜负了人民群众

Sacrifice

By Li Lvtao (10 years old)

The greatest honor for a soldier is to make the ultimate sacrifice.

They are not afraid of sacrificing their lives.

What they are afraid of is only ——

Letting down the people.

湖南小荷诗社，由一群乡村小学生组成，指导老师刘杏丽。

Xiaohe Poetry Society in Hunan Province is composed of a group of rural primary school students, and the instructor is Liu Xingli.

Chopin and I (Third Movement)

1.

 It has to be one of the most familiar pieces of music ever written.  Astrophysicists, Albanian sheepherders, nonagenarians, nine-year-olds—everyone knows it, can hum along to its plodding

   dum dum da dum

   dum da dum da dum da dum

We hear it played in commercials, Bugs Bunny cartoons, and funeral processions of kings and presidents.  But I don’t understand it.  What was Chopin thinking?

“Marche Funèbre,” Sonata no. 2, op. 35, 3^rd movement

 I certainly don’t question the dum dum da dum bit.  We don’t need the title to know it’s a funeral dirge, each dum hammering one more nail in the coffin.  Or, rather, it’s a glacial march, mourners moving reluctantly, haltingly forward, each step bringing them closer to their beloved’s tomb, or pyre, or hole in the ground, gone, gone forever.

 I watched JFK’s funeral procession on the tube in black and white, November, 1963.  Tired of the Royals, though (will Netflix ever finish off The Crown?), I skipped the one for Queen Elizabeth II.  More vivid than either in my mind’s eye, I see cute little Mark Lester leading a black-crèpe-draped, horse-drawn hearse down a sooty London street in Oliver.  Did they play “Marche Funèbre” to accompany him?  I don’t recall, but I’d put my money on it.  The funeral processions I’ve participated in, though, all involved a line of cars, lights on, caravanning down city streets as drivers (in the old days) slowed to the curb to let us pass or (today) whipped around us, glaring or flipping us off or, mostly, fiddling with cell phones.  I’ve never seen a funeral procession on foot in real life—and certainly none on horseback.

 Wait, though.  That march, that cadence, it does ring a bell.  Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance,” me capped and gowned shuffling solemnly forward, stutter-step at a time?  Close, but not that.

 Ah, I have it.  September, 1969.  Pvt. Dennis Vannatta, fresh out of MP school, arrives for his first posting at West Point in time for the brilliant fall colors adorning the banks of the Hudson but, alas, too late for Woodstock, only a few miles away.  

 I heard some great stories about what transpired there, a few of them possibly true.  Our cadre, though, had more serious issues on their minds.  Anti-war demonstrations were firing up around the county, and rumors had it that hordes of radicals were about to descend upon the United States Military Academy shouting incendiary passages from Howl and “On Civil Disobedience” and otherwise wreaking havoc.  It was up to us MPs to maintain order.  We were to remain especially vigilant in the face of coeds from Vassar, just up the road in Poughkeepsie, intent on seducing us away from our duty.  We were all, needless to say, anxious to have our mettle tested if face of such a threat.

 To brush up on our riot-control technique, one morning we were assembled on the 57^th MP parking lot with our M-14s, bayonets (in scabbards) fixed.  We formed in ranks, shoulder pressed to shoulder, rifles slanted forward butt against hip, bayonet point directed right at the hypothetical nose of the would-be rioter.  Then we began to move slowly, inexorably forward:  left half-step followed by right brought up alongside left, left half-step followed by right . . . etc. etc. Each step was planted firmly, boot-soles scuffing the blacktop.

SCUFF-scuff SCUFF-scuff SCUFF-scuff . . .

How could any hirsute draft-dodger stand to our onfall?  Oh yes, this was serious stuff.

 Not!

 There are no wisecrackers like Army wisecrackers.  At this distance of more than a half a century, I don’t remember any specific jokes, but I do remember that we laughed a lot to the mounting fury of our platoon sergeants, and I do remember that no joke measured up to the supreme gesture of my pal Ken Watson, who SCUFF-scuffed his way across the parking lot with a condom affixed to his bayonet.  Make love, not war.

 Ken would always keep a condom or three handy for when he scored with one of the coeds at Ladycliff College in Highland Falls, just beyond the main gate at West Point.  We’d go to the bars in search of said coeds, and there they’d usually be.  We’d sit eyeing them, Ken rehearsing his foolproof seduction strategy.  We’d sit, stare, talk—to each other.  He never worked up the courage to actually talk to a coed.  Ken Watson, nineteen years old, from Blue Mound, Iowa, away from home for the first time.  Great guy.  I loved him.  A few months after arriving at West Point, I was “levied out,” as they called it, to West Germany, and a month after that, Ken was levied out to Vietnam, where he drove his jeep over a landmine and came home in pieces.  I still miss him, still laugh thinking of that condom-adorned bayonet, still think that

SCUFF-scuff SCUFF-scuff SCUFF-scuff . . .

is the saddest damn thing, my own personal funeral march.

*

 It may seem an associational stretch to tie Chopin to Vietnam, but he, too, had war on his mind.  Chopin was inspired to write “Marche Funèbre” after the Polish uprising against Russia in 1830.  An aside:  the wording of the previous sentence gave me trouble, and I’m still not satisfied with “inspired by.”  “To commemorate” was considered but rejected.  “To celebrate”?  No.  “To honor”?  Huh uh.  “In recognition of”?  Meh. 

My problem is that I don’t know what Chopin felt, and my efforts to imagine it get mixed up with my own feelings about Vietnam.  Chopin himself was not an insurrectionist.  He wrote Sonata no. 2 from the safety of Paris, having left Poland shortly before violence broke out, and in fact never saw his homeland again.  As for me, I read about the carnage in Vietnam in The Stars and Stripes while quaffing primo beer at my duty station in Germany, when not heading to Paris and the like on three-day passes.  I was damn glad I wasn’t “in country.”  I also felt a tiny bit guilty.  Today, an old man, I feel more than a tiny bit . . . well, not guilty, exactly.  But I feel that I missed out on something that my brothers-in-arms experienced with an intensity that I can only imagine.  I didn’t fight; I didn’t have the courage to abandon everything and escape to Sweden; I went to the Black Forest and drank Parkbrau out of spring-top bottles.

 But what did Chopin feel?

2.

 We need to return to the music itself.

 Here, my perplexity only deepens because that famous dum dum da dum is only the first of three motifs recurring throughout the third movement.  The other two aren’t funereal at all.

 After the dum dum da dum is repeated, with variations, a few times, the score suddenly shifts from minor key to major, and we rise, we soar.

 It’s as if funereally plodding Mark Lester suddenly began to pirouette down that grim London street scattering rose petals, the black-caparisoned horse, too, hearse-freed, lifting its knees in time to the swelling music, proudly prancing.  Hm.  I did in fact see something like this—now what is that movie?—cavalry-mounted horses dancing in rank as if auditioning for a martial Folies Bergère.  Ah, I have it:  Oh! What a Lovely War, the cavalry training for a war that no longer needed cavalry, one in which they’d dismount and rise rank on rank out of the trenches to be mown down in their millions.

 I can’t seem to get away from war, which surely does a disservice to that soaring major-key motif where something is affirmed.  Was Chopin celebrating a Poland of the past, that aristocratic Poland that once lorded it over the barbaric Russians?  Or was he envisioning a wished-for Poland, free, and Warsaw the Paris of central Europe?  What did Chopin affirm?  Not just Poland but something for all of us, surely.

 I think of my father-in-law, a callow lad of little education and no means emerging from Jersey City to marry the woman of his dreams and found a construction company in Queens, eventually owning condos in Florida and apartment houses within surf-sound of Rockaway Beach.  But it wasn’t his material accomplishments that cause me to think of him as one of the very few great men I’ve known; no, it was his generosity, goodness, humanity.

 A six-foot-five giant of a man, he died hard, broken, so crippled by arthritis and age that he couldn’t even push himself in his wheelchair, each breath an effort, an agony.  From half a continent away, my wife and I kept a deathwatch via cellphone, both dreading and hoping for the call that would inevitably come.  Then my sister-in-law called to say that a priest had administered the last rites.  The end was near.  The next morning a text came, advising us to check the attached video.  And there he was, sitting as upright as he could manage, grimacing from the pain, the effort to leave us all with a model of courage, of affirmation; there was Big John Kimball, singing.

Well, I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield, down by the riverside
Down by the riverside, down by the riverside
I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield, down by the riverside
Ain’t gonna study war no more

 You can see him on YouTube in the A&E documentary, The Hooligan Navy, where he and other rejects from regular service (flat feet for him) sailed into the stormy waters of the Atlantic in wooden boats (couldn’t be detected by radar) in search of German submarines.  It was during the war that he met lovely Marie Marksamer at a USO in Rockaway, married her, and afterwards went into the construction business with a pal he met in the service.  A Coast Guard honor guard accompanied him to his grave.  Big John would not have wanted Chopin’s funeral dirge played, but I think he, a life-affirmer to the end, would have approved of the major-key motif. 

 I just cannot seem to get away from war, though.  Was Uncle Ted in the military?  Not that I know of.  Why do I think of him, anyway?  Maybe I’ll find out as I write this.

  As a child I was fascinated by Uncle Ted as only one who hasn’t decided what color sheep he’s going to be can be fascinated by the black sheep of the family.  My relatives on both sides of the family were country folk and Baptist, but my mother’s side were back country folk and hard-shell Baptist.  Most of them never got out of those Ozark hollows where they barely scraped by on hard-scrabble farms.  Uncle Ted, my mother’s brother, left and never looked back.

 He would come to visit, though, and when he did, oh, he was something!  He’d burst into the house dancing and singing, activities not enthusiastically embraced in our staunchly Baptist household.  While my mother scowled and my father, never failing in courtesy even to Uncle Ted, tried to look amused, I would throw myself into his arms, and he’d sling me about the room in a wild waltz.

 I recall one night our singing at the top of our lungs,

  She’ll be riding that old red rooster when she comes,

  When she comes!

And when they tried to correct us, we sang,

  We will kill six white horses when she comes,

  When she comes!

 I laughed so hard I had a coughing fit and nearly vomited.  My mother yanked me out of Uncle Ted’s arms and then grabbed him by the lapels of his wool coat, which smelled to me of January and cigarette smoke, and pressed her nose right up to his lips.  I thought she was going to kiss him.

 Then:  “Get out!  I won’t have this in my home, Ted.  Get out!”

 She dragged him to the front door and pushed him out into the winter night.  (Later, my sister, seven years my senior, explained to me that Uncle Ted had been drinking.  “Drinking what?” I asked.)

 I haven’t mentioned Aunt Beat, Uncle Ted’s wife.  Typical.  She tended to get ignored, all attention drawn to her pyrotechnic husband.  What did she do that night?  Did she leave with her banished spouse?  Or remain inside with us—and if she did so, did Uncle Ted wait for her out in the cold?  I think she cried, but maybe I’m just imagining what I think a woman in her position probably would have done.

 The grim details were never discussed in my presence, but even as a child I knew that he led her a hard life.  Why else was she rarely mentioned without the obligatory “poor Beat”?  Indeed, although I could hardly believe the calumny, until my sister laughingly disabused me of the notion, I thought she was called Aunt Beat because Uncle Ted beat her.  Poor Aunt Beatrice.

 I could have told you only two things for sure about Aunt Beat back then:  that she smiled a lot and that she was a “good church lady.”  (This was before the time of Dana Carvey and Saturday Night Live.)  To us, a good church lady was a woman who, beyond whatever home life she might have had, lived of and for and pretty much in the church.  A church lady would help out in the nursery, serve breakfast to bereaved families before funerals, clean up after Easter communion—whatever was needed.  I never saw Aunt Beat actually do any of these things—she and Uncle Ted lived in Warsaw, then Fulton, then Jeff City—but I didn’t have to.  We all knew what a good church lady did.

 It was the smile that seems more meaningful in retrospect.  She suffered much with Uncle Ted, who was a “real rounder”—which back then I guessed had something to do with basketball—but that perpetual smile she wore as she sat almost invisible at family reunions was not a long-suffering smile.  It was the smile of a woman who knew that something, eventually, was coming to her.  I think the thing for which she patiently waited was that second motif in Chopin’s “Marche Funèbre.”

 But first, the funeral had to come.  I was in college when Uncle Ted died.  I wasn’t much concerned with aunts and uncles by then and didn’t go to his funeral, don’t remember what he died of, probably didn’t give a thought to Aunt Beat.  I saw her a year or two later at a Christmas reunion.  I was on the cusp of losing my 2-S student deferment and was more concerned about getting drafted than the fact that Aunt Beat had brought a man with her, one George Oakley.  Still, Aunt Beat and a man!

 The scandal came later.  I learned about it in bits and pieces over the next few years.  Evidently, that first time George had been introduced to everyone simply as “a friend.”  Then they were more than just friends:  romance was in the air.  Then they were married, followed not long afterward by George’s death.  Aunt Beat inherited everything—quite a chunk, in fact, because George owned a string of auto parts stores.  A lawsuit followed, initiated by George’s children from his first marriage.  Entertaining stuff.  But then the real shocker.  George’s first wife did not die, leaving him eligible again, until after the George-Aunt Beat romance was in full swing!  Ohmygod!  There’d never been anything like it in the histories of the Vannatta-Stadler families.  “I can’t believe I let that woman [i.e., Aunt Beat] into my house!  They slept in our house!”  my mother wailed.  

 Aunt Beat bought a condo in Naples, Florida, and died some years later.  I picture her walking on the beach.  Maybe she thinks for a moment of her life with Uncle Ted.

  Dum dum de dum . . .

But then she thinks of what came next, and here comes that little smile as Chopin shifts to a major key, and Aunt Beat begins to dance!

3.

 Land sakes, as they say in these parts, how on earth did I get to this point, following Aunt Beat as she waltzes down the beach in Naples, Florida?  I don’t know if her condo was near the beach.  I don’t even know if she liked the beach.  Maybe, like me, she hated the feel of sand anywhere on her body, hated to sweat under a beating sun, sweat mixed with salt from the drying seawater.  Ugh.  

 I can blame it on Chopin, though, the way he’s messed with me with his loopy “Marche Funèbre.”  If only it were a simple binary dirge-vs.-major-key crescendo, death vs. life, I could handle that.  After the major-key motif, however, Chopin shifts again to, well, what, exactly?  My two years of grade-school band (playing an asthmatic alto sax) did not prepare me to discuss in technical terms what Chopin does at this point.  The score does not pound nails into coffin; it does not soar with the angels; it becomes instead gentle, lilting, tender.  It could almost be a lullaby.

 Chopin never had children.  Indeed, it’s difficult to picture the Chopin of Hollywood and cable-TV legend, or even the Chopin of sober biographic reality, as having children.  Maybe he did try to picture it, though.  He wrote his “Marche Funèbre” a little more than halfway through his thirty-nine years.  Maybe he was looking forward to a life of myth-busting conventionality with a wife turning the pages of the score as he played piano and toddlers played at his feet.  Or, alternately, maybe he saw the rest of his life as it would truly be—fame, affairs, a slow death from consumption, leaving no progeny—and his lullaby was a nod to what he’d never have.  All I know for sure is that I hear children in that third motif, children playing among the tombstones.

 Aunt Beat and Uncle Ted never had children, either.  My strict Baptist parents did, unaccountably, have children, among them, of course, moi.  My wife and I have two children.  My daughter has cats; my son has three sons.  I shall now regale you with several pages of cute anecdotes about my grandsons.

 Well, no, I’ll spare you that.  But I can’t ignore thoughts of children that arise naturally (or mysteriously?) under the influence of “Marche Funèbre.”  Not surprisingly, perhaps, those thoughts never stray far from death.

 No prospect terrifies a parent more than the death of a child.  I’ve been fortunate in knowing no one closer to me than a fairly distant acquaintance to suffer that calamity.  But I thought about the possibility every single time one of my children fell sick.  I’d be surprised if other parents didn’t share that same experience.  A friend, for instance, told me that the first time he saw his son’s blood (a cut finger), he was staggered by the realization that his son would one day die.  And I’m sure he prayed, as every parent prays, Please God, let that day not come until after I’m gone.  The likelihood that the vast majority of us parents will get our wish in that regard is cold comfort indeed because, now or later, come that day will.

 It is, one might say, simply nature’s way.  Another friend of mine offered a variation on this when my son was born.  “Well, there’s one for you,” he said.  I asked him what he meant.  He said my son had come to take my place.  The son comes into the world; the father, his purpose fulfilled, moves out of it.  

Nature as zero-sum game—no doubt true, if rather chilling for us superfluous fathers.  More to the point, true or not, it doesn’t evoke what I feel in Chopin’s lullaby.

 Maybe this.  Just this morning I had coffee with a former student of mine whom I hadn’t seen in twenty years.  He caught me up on what he’d been doing, and I him, and then I turned the conversation to what he, the most voracious reader among my hundreds of English majors, had been reading.  Well, he said, he didn’t have much time for reading.  He was busy with this and that, but mostly he was enjoying time with his four-year-old daughter, a Down’s syndrome child.

 To say that I have a fondness for little children is to indulge in understatement.  If I see a little child from a block away, my heart does Arabesques.  A negative side to that impulse, though, is that I so want nothing but good things for children that the thought of a handicapped child is enough to make me go into convulsions of pity.  In this case, I managed to control myself because I saw that my student didn’t want pity for his child.  He wanted me to see her as he did:  a unique being who experiences the world as a place ever new and wondrous.  

  I tried to share in his joy, I really did, but my friend’s child is “special” in more than one sense.  She’s statistically rare.  My grandson James, five years old, is more representative of the childhood most of us experience.  Not long ago, a propos of nothing, James asked me, “Grandpa, do you think you’ll live to be a hundred, or will you pass away first?”  He wasn’t at all worried about it; he was just curious.  His dad (my son) laughed when I told him about it.  “James doesn’t really understand the finality of death,” he said.  But how wonderful!  To live in the world in which the one unquestionable constant is that all living things die and yet not be battered into despair by the inevitability, not even affected by it, hell, not even aware of it.  

Or does that just make James another version of the Down child?  But there’s a difference—and it’s a very poignant difference, I think.  James carries within him the seed of the old man he’ll become, an old man who can almost remember what it was to see the world as a child, like a melody heard long ago that he strains to hear again.

*

 But where does this leave us with Chopin?  

 Maybe we should “read” the “Marche Funèbre” as a musical equivalent of Alejo Carpentier’s story, “Journey Back to the Source,” which begins with a dying old man and then moves ever backward through prime of life to childhood and eventually to the womb.  Yes, Chopin does begin with the death dirge, then follows it with the major-key motif (prime of life?), and follows that with his “lullaby.”  But here we run into a problem because the movement doesn’t end there.  The dirge returns, followed by the major-key motif, followed by etc. etc.  Maybe Chopin was reaching for a certain Nietzschesque “eternal return,” everything passing only to return; or maybe some sort of Buddhist . . .

 Ah hell, I don’t know.  And maybe Chopin didn’t either.  Maybe he was just following the music wherever it led him, just as I’ve followed his “Marche Funèbre” to some strange places indeed.

Wait, though.  I keep ignoring the fact that “Marche Funèbre” is just one part of a greater whole, the Sonata no. 2.  If I remember correctly from my sophomore Music Appreciation class, sonatas have three movements and frequently end in a coda.  So, I’ll find Sonata no. 2, listen to the whole blamed thing, and follow wherever it leads me.  The prospect is a little daunting, somehow, but even more exciting.  Think of it, at my age, to be excited.

Dennis Vannatta is a Pushcart and Porter Prize winner, with essays and stories published in many magazines and anthologies, including River Styx, Chariton Review, Boulevard, and Antioch Review.  His sixth collection of stories, The Only World You Get¸ was published by Et Alia Press.

Bad Neighbor

He’s out with

His London

On a chilly 

Monday morning

London needs

To use the bathroom

The two of them

Are right outside the apartment

And then some neighbor

Who is walking his dog

Sees the two of them

And starts marching their way

The man and the dog

Are coming right at them

And this isn’t

The first time

That this guy

Has done this

So he picks London up

And crosses the street

Then he makes

A few comments about

The guy’s intelligence and more

He’s holding London

As he makes his comments

The guy who doesn’t know how

To walk a dog

Is very surprised to receive

This negative feedback

And then some

More words are exchanged

And then the guy

Who doesn’t know how

To walk a dog

Walks away with his dog.

Taylor Dibbert is a poet in Washington, DC. He’s author of, most recently, “Takoma.”

CURSE AND CURE

I am the witch who carries a coven within

and the convict who wears all his prisons inside;

the exorcist who fondles the beads and signs

and the amnesty dangling the keys aside.

MY TAILOR,

crisp in his pins and thimbles,

circles and takes my measure.

He garments me by his threads

and then applies his scissors.

EPONYMOUS

Think of the inventions

named for their inventors,

modest benefactors

made by Thomas Crapper

or infamous machines

that victimed Guillotine.

ANTIKARMIC

Ah! those lovenotes I sent–

Valentines back I get,

all addressed OCCUPANT

INANIMATE ENAMORATA

Pleeztameetyu / whaddyudu?

If I could do anything, I’d love to be your free flowing hair,

the fingertips of my follicles tickling your constant shoulders:

you, praising my full body to the skies–

I’d shear you clear off like a lamb’s wool in springtide!

or the palm softened wood of your habitual guitar

cradled into your passionate lap,

neck caressed to perfect pitch —

Even music, I’d gladly banish

if it meant pitching you!

the very odor eaters in your shoes,

if only I could embrace your soul —

But for a day only.

Then bedside

(eagerly coldly)

I’d abandon you

that’s as far as you’d ever get!

then, I guess I’d have to settle on

acting your bathroom mirror,

investigating your secret life

entire–

And I’d shatter your face into diamonds,

just like your illusions,

you peepfuckingpervert tom!

(leaving me in that case merely to wish upon

your vacant genital cavity

your manlacking pussy

handhungry tits,

that the

gap

in your ass beas

empty

as my harmless romantic fantasies–)