Three SOLDIERs, with rifles, bayonets fixed, and steel helmets, crouch just below the wall of a trench. They look from right to left on the stage, and are in ascending profile from the audience perspective.
In front of the three SOLDIERs is a wall, which should represent the wall of the trench. The stage is totally dark, except for three spotlights on the SOLDIERs. All speech should be spoken very quickly. Commas and periods should be carefully observed by the actors. (Periods are full stops, commas half.)
Throughout the play the SOLDIERs should look straight ahead and not at one another. They should not move.
FIRST SOLDIER
I’m like an animal, my teeth bared, my ears pinched with disavowal.
SECOND SOLDIER
Into the corridor down the hall, wind in your hair, pieces of broken moonlight flying by.
THIRD SOLDIER
Gray with sodium and grit, ash of death, suddenly in a cloud.
SECOND SOLDIER
Up. Into the.
FIRST SOLDIER
Remembering my whole life in a burst. My loves, my.
THIRD SOLDIER
Tanned by days in the sun. My father’s land, the land I worked. The trench now full of blood and water.
FIRST SOLDIER
Into the gooseberry patch with her, in the summer, her hand, slipped into mine.
SECOND SOLDIER
Apprehension of smoke, disaster. Form giving way to being. Free, then being’s gone.
THIRD SOLDIER
Each step on the open ground. Perfidious. It lies, gives way, and we’ll be. Yes. No. We’ll be gone, straggle back like wounded swans.
FIRST SOLDIER
Her slim white legs like silk against a screen.
THIRD SOLDIER
Into the inexhaustible dust. Beaten flat. Dust. That word. Du —
FIRST SOLDIER
Pierced through with isolation, my self, my —
SECOND SOLDIER
There they sit, hands over eyes, waiting for? No, for what? Clouds, grayish overhead. Vernacular of night and death. O! The stars.
FIRST SOLDIER
Every particle of order flowing through her strawberry hair. The chords of her throat, tight. Like a valve, she!
THIRD SOLDIER
A stray dog yelps. My beard is black. Staring into open space ahead, — and now?
SECOND SOLDIER
Through a screen of resistance. A force turns us out of life like orphans.
FIRST SOLDIER
When in Vienna that summer before the war. I told her that I. Now the dazzling ring under me, the burning pith.
SECOND SOLDIER
Disintegration. Our lungs drowned in mud.
THIRD SOLDIER
Crying. Crying? Who is crying out to us?
FIRST SOLDIER
What I’ll lose. They don’t understand. Her love, not this body, no. Her love, her!
SECOND SOLDIER
J’accepte. Go to sleep. Pinch the candle, snuff the flame. Push me down the stairs.
FIRST SOLDIER
Ringing in my ears, I’ll swim through it. Reach back to her —
SECOND SOLDIER
This damned ringing! Fallen angels shrieking.
THIRD SOLDIER
When in the evening, the sun through the wheat.
SECOND SOLDIER
Shrieking, mad with.
THIRD SOLDIER
My body of oak and granite. My.
SECOND SOLDIER
Sun crowning all. At night we. Reclaims us, the blackness.
FIRST SOLDIER
Her torso of unpainted marble. And will she, yes? Come to find where I?
THIRD SOLDIER
In unpeopled world, all will live. Soon. Our bodies stripped to nothing.
SECOND SOLDIER
Nameless, nameless, who is?
THIRD SOLDIER
Death: within you I grow like a tree.
FIRST SOLDIER
Consolation of? Of her closeness, her warmth.
SECOND SOLDIER
Each day swallowing the next.
THIRD SOLDIER
Let me feel, closer, truer, this beatitude of home.
SECOND SOLDIER
Metal hanging in the shredded air.
FIRST SOLDIER
Through the gooseberries, hand-in-hand we’ll go.
SECOND SOLDIER
Concussed, thrown by the blast against the ground. Never, I’ll never be again that.
THIRD SOLDIER
Mille fiori. The land quiet in the morning. Animals out to pasture.
FIRST SOLDIER
Blue, that star-shower. Her hair, her mouth. All that I embrace.
SECOND SOLDIER
A motion! A million motions! A cry! Burst! Up!
THIRD SOLDIER
My unspiritual body, rotting like an uncored apple.
FIRST SOLDIER
White moon. Her eyes white, turning over.
SECOND SOLDIER
Let be. O Cosmos, wing me into fire!
THIRD SOLDIER
Joy, memory, the void of this natural life.
FIRST SOLDIER
And why would she? If I died here? Raise a family. Forget me, yes.
THIRD SOLDIER
Some presence seeks us, will gut us like fish.
SECOND SOLDIER
Sleepless through the ash valley. Powder and stone. I am alone.
THIRD SOLDIER
How far like stems we push through the ground of time. Soon to be reaped like corn.
FIRST SOLDIER
The resistance is luminous.
SECOND SOLDIER
The mind slithering like ivy up a wall.
FIRST SOLDIER
More grace — she gives me grace and despair. The curtains billowing around us kissing in the window.
THIRD SOLDIER
My body is a long arc of light, it slips beyond the horizon.
SECOND SOLDIER
A premise reversed; we shall live. Up boys, over the wall!
FIRST SOLDIER
Her body naked before me.
THIRD SOLDIER
Self-contained, so that when the body dies, all dies.
SECOND SOLDIER
Not the company of punishment! The punishment of company!
THIRD SOLDIER
The dead in their realm of peace. Sapped of life, this force of life.
FIRST SOLDIER
Flood tide of desire. The origin of it, I!
THIRD SOLDIER
To preach that it is better to live than anything —
FIRST SOLDIER
Then I’ll surrender for it, completion.
SECOND SOLDIER
Men shattered like porcelain plates thrown against a wall. Teacups, saucers.
THIRD SOLDIER
Whole, then split apart. Split, then ground to dust. Dust!
FIRST SOLDIER
The mind driven like cattle towards the end —
SECOND SOLDIER
The last fields, all flowers.
THIRD SOLDIER
I repeat, dust. Not dust. Dust. Pure red of a dying sun.
FIRST SOLDIER
Her body like piano ivory. And the music of her. The scale, moving under my fingertips.
THIRD SOLDIER
This oxygenated space, all up in one conflagration. All heat, not flame.
SECOND SOLDIER
Brush away the starlight like ice-shavings. Into the gulf of night!
FIRST SOLDIER
Cutting the excess marble from her. Bring her to perfection in memory.
SECOND SOLDIER
The concussion, it shook me. Up, down. Over the fire-step, ho!
THIRD SOLDIER
Like a tree felled at the bottom, toppling into darkness.
FIRST SOLDIER
Breathless. We. Splintering then. To the touch.
SECOND SOLDIER
Meadow of silk and ash. Bodies bleeding wildly into earth.
THIRD SOLDIER
Crushed poppy-seed. Accept our life, lotus, bloom. All of us.
FIRST SOLDIER
Then her children, someone else’s. I’ll go unremembered.
THIRD SOLDIER
O, this inhuman silence. Bodiless. Dust!
SECOND SOLDIER
Gaping at the unlit terrain. Opening ahead. Broken up. When at dawn. With paper bodies. We! Touched into sky.
FIRST SOLDIER
A mystery so quiet, like a raindrop, or? That. My god.
SECOND SOLDIER
Dumb among the bodies. A beast broken, howling on its back.
THIRD SOLDIER
Shot through with a charge of light. Generally then, all of us. Torn to shreds.
FIRST SOLDIER
Arc of steel-white foam. Headlands of mourning. I’ll face it, no. I’ll turn away.
THIRD SOLDIER
Eggs and butter from the cupboard. Each day rising with the sun. No more.
SECOND SOLDIER
Up! Up! Into the indistinct!
FIRST SOLDIER
Her navel rising like flame from the sea. Chalk-white the cliffs. Wherefore to Dover?
THIRD SOLDIER
Last stillness before the body unwinds. A thread of gossomer.
SECOND SOLDIER
They’ll follow us, driven down, the marble crosses.
FIRST SOLDIER
With joy, knowing this my last, I’ll be overcome. O, heart, break!
SECOND SOLDIER
Like a twig! Snap! Snap!
THIRD SOLDIER
Stones of the old house. Moss and flowers.
SECOND SOLDIER
We’ll make our bargains! Live! Renew! Snap! Snap!
THIRD SOLDIER
Image of truth, of sorrow.
FIRST SOLDIER
Stress of silence. I’ll enter there. Smitten by death.
SECOND SOLDIER
Already bare. The tenor birds poached.
THIRD SOLDIER
At the first cry we’ll plunge. All headless.
SECOND SOLDIER
The short spark splits us for good.
FIRST SOLDIER
Ring of stars. While she undreaming slept.
THIRD SOLDIER
Who embodies this grief?
SECOND SOLDIER
History flows into us… then, snapsnapsnap! Ho!
FIRST SOLDIER
My twenty-third year, my last.
SECOND SOLDIER
Blot out a cosmology. Cover all with pellet fire.
THIRD SOLDIER
What I meant to say. That we’re. That I’m.
SECOND SOLDIER
Garland of smoke, dropped around our necks. Stone birds rotting in the trees.
FIRST SOLDIER
Shot through the cheek yesterday. Staggering back over the wall, falling over me, a dead man.
SECOND SOLDIER
A well-honed blade, wiped across a dead-man’s throat.
THIRD SOLDIER
I’ll burden the earth with matter.
FIRST SOLDIER
I’ll adhere to her image, bring to bear my whole being upon it.
THIRD SOLDIER
Pulled down through this bleak envelope of mud —
SECOND SOLDIER
Winnowed into silence. Whole geometries of men. Formations. Transcended. Our original fear, that we have been mislead by fate. Into the breach!
FIRST SOLDIER
Heroes compounded.
THRID SOLDIER
Dust!
FIRST SOLDIER
Bud after bud the flowers outside the glass. Pressing her against the.
SECOND SOLDIER
Your blood drawn, you curl back into a ball. Die there. Snap!
THIRD SOLDIER
My hands like gnarled weeds.
FIRST SOLDIER
Weaned at last from living, I’ll —
SECOND SOLDIER
So close to that acclimation —
THIRD SOLDIER
My feet bruised, blistered, an open sore on my right heel.
FIRST SOLDIER
We couldn’t name it, death.
SECOND SOLDIER
We can’t but we will.
THIRD SOLDIER
Bleating from a ditch.
SECOND SOLDIER
Mutilated by time.
FIRST SOLDIER
What echo from my lungs will sound? When I’m shot through —
THIRD SOLDIER
My father’s farmland in the dusk, my hands between the wheat stalks —
SECOND SOLDIER
Like a bowstring, we shall be unstrung.
FIRST SOLDIER
My nerve and sinew unraveled.
THIRD SOLDIER
After the sun has set while there is still light.
FIRST SOLDIER
O, my love. I’ll come back.
SECOND SOLDIER
Into the time before time.
THIRD SOLDIER
That word. Dust.
Light on the stage increases.
Close curtain.
Sound of whistle. Yelling. Scuffling feet.
(FIN)