This also has to do with another art form--
this time dance.
The title is from John Kelly's theater piece called,
Maybe It's Cold Outside.
Later in the program, a man returns to center stage.
His face painted red, singing Bellini's aria
for a woman mourning her love as a lament over a dying flower.
The modern piece is probably about AIDS.
It is about a fistful of dirt falling from a man dropping
to the boards in his underwear.
The fact of loss is actually pervasive in dance right now.
Visible in ways a man wearing a t-shirt that
says, nobody knows I'm gay, is visible in a crowd we might
imagine would like to hurt him.
Will time bring these children anything good?
The chorus says, that when we get up, we will bury our dead.
When the audience gets up, they are free to go to the bathroom,
free to go back across the fields
to have quick muffled sex, or to take their time.
Maybe it's cold outside, or maybe
two or three friends must be transported to the nearest
medical facility where the normal are not
denied membership, regardless of health.
The text would like us to consider
that all desires enter us, as waters enter
the ever full and unmoved sea.
The text would like us to consider woman metaphorically:
the unfettered frost foam sea.
The text would like us to consider that lasting peace
is never achieved by one who is not complete unto
himself, who still craves worldly things.
The text would like us to consider metaphorically:
woman, a worldly thing.
In a world where armed forces kill largely what
they desire or resemble, sentimentality
remains the shadow of cruelty.
And as for the targets, survival means a soul.
A strong container in which silence
can be churned like a pair of hips.
Did you remember to ask the pond where
else we might find anything so pure, so transparent?
We inhabited a planet.
My love, small kisses.
My love, energetic kisses and fucking were illegal.
It wasn't an opera.
But wherever we travelled, the libretto read,
at the end of the garden rocks, a hammock.
And the water lilies of summer are gone.