Tosca
When I dream, I dream
of emptiness. I am standing at the end
of a long hallway. As at the end of Tosca,
the dead all rise again, applauded
the same. At the end or after the end, I still know nothing
of opera. I know only the room
they’ve been trying to enter
is called mutual regard. As when a tree breaks into blossom,
whatever happens there
seems to happen all at once, making riotous light.
They each have their art.
The villain takes by force, the heroine sings opera, the hero paints.
If there were no supra titles we’d still see the path
of love leading to ruin. As in a true tragedy,
the freedoms they take narrow
to nothing. In the apse of a church, in the villain’s monumental chamber,
in the tower overlooking the pastures, human voices,
innocence and desire in one breath, fill the spaces
between our bodies, hearts. The villain is hiding his intention
while making plain his villainy.
The heroine is relying on a lie.
The hero is dying a hero’s death, meaning
for an idea. In here,
it will soon be morning, where what was planned in the night’s confusion
takes on the clarity of daylight.
If she could have loved him less, if she could have been
less of an artist. If he could had been less true
to his friend, if he could have been more wary.
Outside, it is night.
Outside, winter lurks in the trees.
If we think too long,
too abstractly, we see this is how the villain lives
and dies as well: for an idea.
Understanding himself as an instrument
of pleasure, he has a philosophy
that to possess is not to have but to violate.
As he himself is small,
he must enlarge his presence.
He wants to hear someone cry out, knowing
he himself is the cause.
Before even possessing the heroine, before bending her will,
he is already imagining discarding her after. But what is beauty
to him? What is music? What is art
to someone who wants to possess, to take
by force? A way to instill
understanding. To possess art is to erase it.
We want to say. As to deny it to the villain.
One of my gifts
is I am always misreading lines, so I am always arriving
at new understandings. How familiar and small their story seems
in the end, similar to ours.
Two artists who wanted to make a path together somewhere else.
I remember the poem
that saved my life. I had the sensation of filling with snow,
with a kind of waiting, of muteness. I was eighteen or nineteen.
I thought, this stillness is what I need to carry with me. I had to be careful not to shift
too much or I’d lose that feeling of being part of the world.
It is not pleasure
to give or have, but to take, the villain seems to say
before he dies. In that cavernous space where he brings the lovers, there is one flame.
The windows are tall, stage left. Beyond them, the suggestion
of daylight arriving.
The villain faces them and looks out.
We keep waiting for him to step through them.
He throws open the curtains and we think
he is about to do it.
But he turns back. He wants to hear the pain, press close
the bodies that struggle away.
The hero is offstage, unseen, as his cries ring out.
He will not finish his painting of a woman at prayer whose face
we never see. The heroine does not want to listen
to what’s extracted when a hard thing meets what’s proven to be a softer,
yielding thing. As the body is an instrument.
We see this has been the case all along.
An instrument of belief and intention. The heroine has kept a little deceit
in her in the form of a blade. This will stop no one
from dying.
Our cavernous night is lit by the stage.
We don’t feel daylight will come we are so still.
We watch the curtains fall, rise. It is late
for the young actor tasked with singing the shepherd boy’s song floating high and delicate
over the fields, over the trees.