Writer-in-Residence Sam Miller responds to Precarious #2: Guest Solos (3/5), Maria Hassabi’s Plastic at MoMA (3/7), and Eiko Solo #7 (3/8).

Part 4

“I don’t know if I am trying to do something new, but I know that I am trying to learn something new.
The doors fling themselves open.”

C.D. Wright

Overlapping Solos
(St. Mark’s Church, March 5)

The loneliness of the Noh distance runner
Bird of gray, bird in black, bird of rose, bear of brown, planets in an uncertain rotation, dark matter in southern corners, wild boys eager for small attentions
Drink to me from thine shoe
Then sent drifting into the Parish Hall
Sitting behind R observing J – watching someone you love watching someone they love
Borne back to the sanctuary
(Blow out your candles Eiko)
Your single sandal our wretched castanet.

Abandoned stalks of green
Recovered the other sandal
Dragged futon fabric

Don’t eat the flowers
Don’t feed the bear, repose
While overhead N keeps dancing
Treading toward the not-so-distant dead

And the woman in black tells the blind woman in red what we are seeing

“Somewhere a queen is weeping, somewhere a king has no wife.”

And, yes, a mad King is dancing somewhere between the lion and the graveyard

The last name is written on the white wall, the wild boys are subsiding, no curtain, just an antic curtain call for the remaining refugees that ring this hall
(Choirs of angels sing Fred to his rest)

Part 5

“Groping along the cold walls of silence.”

C.D. Wright

Interlude
(“Plastic” at MoMA, March 7)

Molly’s exposed throat
Helen in Egypt
HD, Lynne Tillman,
Jane Bowles,
“Desert” that desert
That stillness
That this then is not stillness
Art the residue of action
HD again
That sandal’s impression left in the sand,
Dido
Eiko
The salted earth of Carthage

The head held just above the gray stone floor and then the head and the left arm come to rest at that same moment

Trojan women?
(No second Troy)
More Maud Gonne than Hector’s widow
But Eiko as Andromache might satisfy the oracle
(and Koma as “Ohno meets Cassandra” in a parking lot outside of Thebes)

Part 6

“What elegy is, not loss but opposition.”

C.D. Wright

Solo
(11th Street, March 8)

What exactly is the soundscape of mourning? Hand hard against the aluminum facade, shopworn keening, as the cream kimono falls away for the dark indigo.

What to make of this setting?

Do you think you are almost invisible?

That heavy legged table
That strip of white marble
That discarded shard of silk
That bowl again
That hand outstretched to hand pressing water into strange flesh

And then Ophelia and the eaten flowers flee reason as you cross the eleventh river and recede east in the unseasonable sun.