AS IF THE SUN HAD WORDS (REPOSTED IN MEMORIAM TO PIPER LAURIE)

 

AS IF THE SUN HAD WORDS

[for Piper Laurie- 

in the alternate gardens of no cinema yet revealed-

on her irreplaceable voice and its musicality-

her incarnations spun of glass, substantially appearing,

irrevocably, memorable.]

a tone poem on her jewel-like trajectory in the film,

The Grass Harp..written nine years ago, posted now in memoriam.

=======================

it's not made of glass and yet it chimes

her voice like the wind through old roses

in a garden from another time:

gardenia watered

through angelic rains- 

almost - of china - breakable-

ringed with the fanciful;

making the twilight hour

stand-  still-

ghost children, think so-

far away, wavering between Shine and shine

in the brocade of the prismed air, listening

and down the bow of the night's proscenium where

the stars seem to have caught her light.

onstage, on the stage of verities,

simple as a valentine or not-

with scrolled handwriting

you thought you recognized?

was it a dream?

inscribed for someone else's life?

like the debut of flowers in each spring,

a freshness, with a difference -

a painting painted under the one we're used to;

the one we're unaccustomed to feeling, long out of view.

not now

when suddenly the Soul

feels it was stashed in rooms with no other harps

through centuries:

contriving never to be smashed.

not that contemporary,

something harkens farther back

than anyone can remember rehearsing then:

her song, initialed with unaccountable jewels.

jewels on the surface of everything, 

she refracts without even intending to.

and is the world made of crystal, then,

sighed the children, wondering-

with an occasional orchid flare

going up,  from the otherwhere

and is it Christmas everywhere or

only where we are snowing?

where can the fountain flow for

such enchantments and can we go there,

please- and far from the broken things-

drenched in the borealis

up past bedtime-

or, is it, the lost languages of birds or

just her standing in a ray of light

filtering through the green-

about to speak

as if the sun had words

mary angela douglas 7 july 2014;15 october 2023

Note on the poem: How can I explain the appearance of ghost children in the poem when I had nothing to do with it; they appeared of their own accord.  Perhaps, because we are all children before the true spectacle of the theatre, and ghostly in the sense that, caught up in the play, nothing else seems more real to us in that moment, enchanted by a voice as much and sometimes more than the story.

In the case of Piper Laurie I feel her voice and presence was far beyond the roles given her and could have glimmered more if given better writing.  Still, the jeweled light seeps through the almost closed door (I mean, in the lesser roles) - anyway.  God and the angels willed it so.

And I am speaking in the past tense but I wish I were speaking in the present and for the future as well.  Someone with these gifts deserves better vehicles all the days of her life on earth.

Always conveying a quality beyond the roles she is cast in that reaches all the way back to the highest aims and beginnings of world theatre, in my opinion.

Her most perfect performance I believe is

The Grass Harp, heart-breakingly exquisite and the one that inspired this poem.  

The poem reflects the roles I wish she had chosen or to be fair, I wish she were offered.  The kind of actress she would have been in a purer alternate reality and which, despite everything, she still projected, somehow. her voice and presence in itself has still to me those qualities the poem presents and it is a tragedy greater than the genre of tragedy that this did not come to pass, or only, rarely.  Perhaps she was born at the wrong time, being timeless.

Among those rare performances (rare in every sense)  I am looking forward to finding online or, otherwise, viewing her performance as Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, as Auntie Em in Return to Oz and others. And I wish with all my heart I could have seen her onstage in The Glass Menagerie.

I also cherish her performance in Inherit the Wind, with the magnificent actor George C. Scott, and her deeply complex portrayal in The Hustler although I hated that movie because evil certainly triumphed in it.

It is perhaps,important to notice that in the final image of the poem the (unconscious) expectation of the "children" watching her performance just before it begins is that of the children in Maeterlinck's Bluebird - that Light itself will begin to speak.  And it does.  And it has.  Thank you, Piper Laurie.