red sumac
SCENE A
The screen darkens and the manikins, one by one, begin to glow as if their wicks were lit. Music begins, a hammer dulcimer. An image appears onscreen with a woman’s face seen close- up in profile before a stone surface that is quilted with lichen in B&W. Her face is drawn with a deep, lonely pensiveness, as if she had just now been weeping. Her name is LILY-ANNE. Her manikin glows alone in the dark, the dulcimer quiets.
LILY-ANNE (in voice-over)
Listen, father, hear me!
I come to you free of guile:
our well-kept lawns
have ta'en it, but your night
still darkens these sunlit woods
The house re-materializes over which LILY- ANNE is superimposed and semi-transparent; she and the lichened stone now take on color.
CHORUS
(The four are crowded into the real window stage right dimly lit; each speaks one line)
A journey of so few miles
and yet the depths remain
unsounded,
a well of eyes into which
a father should not have fallen . . .
—MUSIC CONTINUES—the dulcimer
LILY-ANNE
I do the chores,
I clean the windows, scour pots and pans,
sweep the cobwebs 'way,
a reward of little more than keeping
my idleness at bay
For you spilt my dreams
as though a chalice
were overturned:
I am become the desert
thy treading footsteps left
O find them, mirror,
lips that tremble, arms to hold
another's warmth:
return my once-bright eyes to me
that Fate has rendered glaucous!
How often after an early snow
had laid its silent feathers
upon these rounding hills
I was the girl the woods saw kneeling
to leave the deer fall apples
—MUSIC STOPS—
When the tale at last
had found your ears, ma mère,
your face became a Janus
as you closed the eyes of one
while the other's, sightless, opened
All the while the face of LILY-ANNE has been seen in profile, unmoving. Now it turns forward.
—MUSIC BEGINS—
LILY-ANNE
After I buried you both
the old house grew cold and still
without your presences:
could Irony's branch
have grown sharper thorns?
—MUSIC STOPS—on “thorns”
LILY-ANNE turns in profile as before. The light enhances her aging beauty, her sadness. As the image dissolves, a blur of letters on the marble comes into view.
CHORUS
You flower now, old man,
in the fragrance of your lilacs
when you had so many years
to bloom along the paths
of a daughter's dancing days . . .
LILY-ANNE’s image fades to darkness, the CHORUS, her manikin also: glow of the other four manikins, etc.