Rehearsal 6: Dramaturgy—Setting and Background
The dead and the living acting out their roles
sign back and forth across the waters of death:
sometimes an ocean, but often just a pool, puddle
that we living step across: the ancestors live
near and far, the land of death plotting
and re-plotting its coordinates as we walk, oblivious,
along its flashing, everchanging shores.
During World War II, in the Far Eastern theater,
while my father played his part in uniform
near Kun Ming in China—"...I was shot at
by local warlords thinking I was another tribe
but don't worry, I'm fine..."—in Congo's Katanga
province, miners are digging up uranium.
Completely unprotected from radiation,
many of them die from cancer: they join
the dead who live the lives of the living,
only reversed: while the living hoe their plots
of ground beyond the village, the dead lie down
to sleep in their beds; and when the living
sleep, the dead prowl through the bush,
keeping herd on leopards, elephants, panthers
as if they were herding goats; the miners
and my dead father both in their versions
of the land of death: the miners' ancestors
make offerings to the dead, consult them
whenever there is trouble: Someone
in the family's ill; they ask who among
the dead is responsible, what do the dead
require to make the pain stop: is it true
that someone has been selling the lungs
of the sick one to a hungry spirit who can fix it
so the seller can go work in a rich man's house?
The Gross Legumes in their Mercedes and couture
from Paris are powerful sorcerers whom the dead help—
but the price for this is that the dead eat the living:
every advantage we living receive is paid for
in the land of the dead, the bodies of the living
are sold piece by piece for the dead to eat.
And when the Gross Legumes die, even they can't buy off death:
In the 19th century the dying king was strangled
by running a rope through a hole in the death hut,
knotting it around the king's neck, and then, from outside
pulling it taut until he strangled—his last breath
breathed in by the new king, or else the dying king's
power breathed out in that last breath would destroy
the village, rampage through the world like an elephant
through the bush. The bomb born in Congo
and dropped on Japan was the prototype for what
my father helped make into an ICBM:
In his world of death he hovers above his son
envisioning Congolese miners who die without
treatment in the barracks but for the sorcerer
who tries to divine what the dead are angry over,
and tries to bargain the dead spirit down
to just the man's lungs; or, even better, a chicken's blood;
he tries to make the dead right with the living:
as a man's son, following a script inscribed
by his father's death, might bargain with the dead
to learn more about the rocket motor burning up
liquid fuel exploding on the launchpad—
the burn too fast, too hot, too close always
to burning out of control: my father becomes
a solid propellant man, the man who goes
to Cape Canaveral to watch the launch
and make sure the burn burns evenly,
at the same temperature, I imagine, as a blast furnace
or crematorium, that plaque of heat
shimmering from beneath the first stage booster
as the rocket slides free of the gantry
and crawls its way slowly up the sky,
the payload with its halflife pervading
in its poison emanations the father with his rifle
hitching a ride back to base after shooting at
and missing some rabbits and being fired on
by the warlord's soldiers; and the miner stripped
on his bunk, the sorcerer inquiring
which ancestor is hungry, what food
do the dead need to let loose of the living.
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