Amores
English National Opera Mini-Opera
Amores by Keith Wait
From The Sweeper of Dreams.
[Characters: A young child, Ion; the Lovers, Corinna and Tristan.]
ION:
In the beginning, I wanted life
But my world was without form, and void.
I longed for mountains and for oceans
For angels and owls, not kingdoms and castles.
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TRISTAN:
We have moved in a different world
Along the very brink of time
CORINNA:
I feel, you know, that love and death are very close.
LOVERS:
At the top of the pendulum’s swing
Where everything begins and ends
We lay in Xanadu floating on a dream.
CORINNA:
Take me now to oblivion where
Our years that have passed, our centuries yet to come
All stop and concentrate upon this moment.
TRISTAN:
The garden stands on the perfumed clifftop
The acrid waves are pounding underneath
Their salty tears may splash and reach
And open up a breach
In time.
CORINNA:
Hold time.
For now we melt as one.
At our twilight moon in silent passion
The world waits.
And all our love and all our spirit
Stand in abeyance for eternity.
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ION:
In the middle there was not time
Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters
There are sages who are not butterflies
A life I never wore, a day to which I never woke.
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LOVERS:
We lovers would so gently slip away
If urgent beauty eased its plunging stress
And let us fade together with the day
Into that silent world of gentleness.
Then drowsy mists would each warm limb caress
And mingle our two perfumes into one
As pulsing bodies sink on tenderness
If all the night could be for us alone.
CORINNA:
That dawn would come more golden than the sun,
Whose kiss the blue and blushful haze of night
Returns with pink looks and shyly runs;
TRISTAN:
My arms would hold such beauty fresh in sight
Arising like the rainbow’s hopeful dove
To touch my heart and ever seal our love.
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ION:
In the ending, life is forfeit.
The leaves of the tree are for the healing.
The Sweeper talks about the weather
In the wreckage of their dreams.
LOVERS:
Drops of moisture feel their careful way
Across the misted window of our world,
Mirror broken with a cracked and crazy web
Echoes the silence that we should have shared.
TRISTAN:
Moist and hard our mouths were pushed together
Tongue against tongue in long and secret longing
Probing deep the secrets of your bower.
I could taste the pulsing fountain welling.
Struggling below the creature fought for breath.
Cruelly, coldly, you stifled all its cries.
After rope, with rope you bound its beauty
Within your fear, and dared not heed its sighs.
Your mouth was hardened. The neck of the golden
Swan was fettered, barred in a whitewashed grille.
CORINNA:
I have the impression,
TRISTAN: slowly you said,
CORINNA:
That you are a stubborn man …… …… ……
TRISTAN:
I could have bathed in your cleansing fountain
To lift and purify my aching soul
But the gush did not come but silently
And left me wanting, needing to be whole.
Again you lead me in the labyrinth
Through a mirrored maze where I cannot reach,
Behind a barrier of glinting glass,
Your half-known beauty and its fleeting touch.
Do you remember I told you of my dream?
Bitter- honey moon where dark corridors
Led between a thousand rooms in oaken gloom
Unlit stairs ended in mocking mirrors.
In which room did you wait arched and spurting
Where the perfume dried?
Noli me tangere.
The corridors all end now in mirrors.
The mouth is shut.
Drops of moisture feel their careful way
Across the misted window of our world,
Mirror broken with a cracked and crazy web
Echoes the silence that we should have shared.
© K.F.Wait, May 2012, under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike licence
