David Castleman
INTERROGATIONS AT NOON by Dana Gioia
NOSFERATU by Dana Gioia
Thusly we are offered 2 books by this erudite accomplished writer, one
a book of poems and one an a cappella opera, a play for precisely assigned
singings. Each piece is a formality, in that sense celebratory and a matter
of incantations strung sequentially.
In dusty fields I harvested the vine
And sweated at the lever as the grapes were pressed.
My aching hands still clutched their vagrant wages,
Sleeping in the cold barracks of the dispossessed.
But now at dawn, beyond the reach of reason,
I wake in the chateau between your tangled sheets,
My sunburnt arm across your naked shoulder,
The mute accomplice of our mutual defeat.
(ACCOMPLICE)
Differently we different scribblers ply our wares: some broad hands stitch
stout cords through pages of burlap, and some poets dip an angel's feather
to trace with blood on waters, and some basic fellows scrape their tails
on the floor and hoist themselves away.
This man assimilates his personal and his impersonal experiences into
one fund and he draws from that fund adroitly, skirting sometimes a beach
of preciosity, sometimes the desert of the mundane. He appears a relic of
a grander age, kept ceaselessly in repair.
The future shrinks
Whether the past
Is well or badly spent.
We shape our lives
Although their forms
Are never what they meant.
(CURRICULUM VITAE)
Despite the lapping preciousness always he strives to strip his meanings
bare, and that requires an adjustment in the meaning itself, in the attitude
and the posture of his truth.
***
How long I've waited for
This night, this room, this bed.
How long I've ached to touch
Your arms, your lips, your hair.
And you were waiting, too—
Waiting unaware.
Everybody is familiar with the unhappy legend of Dracula, whether through
Abraham Stoker's DRACULA, or Murnau's NOSFERATU. Mr. Gioia brings us his
version in this wordplay, and it is a gloriously gloomy bringing. As we read
the voices clamor and quest in our mind's ear, and the stage proceeds. We
hear the music loud and deeply bellowing as if in underground catacombs,
with a dry sinuous baritone feeding hungrily on soprano and bass.
Everywhere is the despair of recognition, the Faustian yelp.
Everywhere is formality. One brave woman chooses to slay the dragon by
dangling the syrupy cage he most desires before his astonished senses until
the sun walks on the horizon and announces LIGHT.
Discreetly Mr. Gioia draws a curtain across that bedroom window, a light
curtain, and we discover a lacuna, a hole in the dramatic tapestry. What
could any mere woman have offered this fallen angel, this tortured noseless
abomination of the gods? Could any mere human have wakened his desiccated
blood into a sensual rage? I doubt it.
This would have been an opportune moment to observe the psychological
anguish of the physiological animal who was smitten by God. Suicide must
have been the adventure he selected, not the dangled cage of lust. He would
have known, bearing the wisdom of the ages.
Finally, he would have anticipated, she was only an acidic irrelevance,
not even a key. Her way had been too easy, though it worked. He would have
known. What had we, merely a confused herd of gaping primates, to offer such
as he?
Wanting was more than she could offer him. Wanting was a prodigious dredging
of his psyche, of his soul, perhaps. He might have twisted forth a heresy comprising
all the truth enabled him. It would be a wreaking.
What springing substance wise men call the soul
is tossed like a fisherman's net in waters
on the chiseled rocks of the psychic waste
and, by God, it's ready to put by.
Not though I passed through centuries I knew
it had been better I had been content
to dwell within and not throughout my mind
and, my unrest I'm ready to put by.
Let me achieve with multitudes the cool
mortality the standing sheep endure
since death has been magnificent living
but, by God, it's ready to put by.
What guts have I to speak the word AMEN
through such experience envelops me
along this path I've been forsaken on
when, like the rest, I'm ready it's put by?
Being Lucifer's brat
I am God's accomplice.
—David Castleman
