Shadow Play recounts in untitled and narrative poems a journey across Asia taken in the mid-1970’s through the contemplative eyes of its narrator decades later. At its core is the dissolution of a young marriage and the imagined discourse the narrator has with her former husband about the mystery of love, whether it ends or not. Her perplexity over the question leads the narrator to conclude that “Love’s a puzzle. A test. / A miracle, I guess.” Inconclusive perhaps, but hard won, as she argues with herself through the conjured voice of her former husband. As far-flung as Shadow Play is in setting, it’s also domestic and close to the heart. These are poems with the intelligence and vigilance that Paul Valéry says might serve to represent and restore what “cries, tears, caresses, kisses, sighs, etc., try obscurely to express…” Herewith is an excerpt of Jody Bolz’s novella in verse, Shadow Play.
—Jason DeYoung
.
Shadow Play
On the train across Java
we slept in a knot:
my head in your lap,
your head on my back,
two hundred miles
through the tropical dark
in shuddering third-class.
At every major stop,
a skirmish of shouted light—
vendors hawking tea and rice
to sleep-drugged passengers—
receded in a rush,
the jasmine-scented silence
sweet and abrupt.
When the station’s speakers
keened their exit song,
the train lurched on.
Whirr of palm and banyan,
gibbous moon, skewed night sky—
green stars above the village mosque
jumped and scuttled by
in deranged constellations.
We stretched, switched positions:
your hair red as rose stalks
against my faded dress,
my braids strict shadows
on your moonlit back,
our fractured dreams resettling….
Outside Bandung at dawn,
I shook my buzzing limbs,
cracked our dusty window open
to mountain air.
A boy wrapped in a shawl
shot past in the brightening field.
One child, then another—
a horde of barefoot children
in tattered pastel sweaters
raced beside the tracks,
calling out for coins,
for candies,
falling far behind us
by the time we reached
their shanties: tin roofs
at the rail-bed’s edge—
doorways set in sloping walls,
a threshing floor,
an open sewer.
As our train slowed
a pregnant girl,
waist-long hair undone,
stepped out of a hovel
fastening her sarong.
We passed her without speaking,
tugging at the taut string
of our marriage
as it rose over rice-fields,
climbing into monsoon clouds,
swaying there—spiraling—
not some thing,
not a child’s kite:
our common life, flown
above another Asian city
in the year we made a home
out of our bodies.
§
I’m shaping a mosaic
out of broken bits…
not exactly a gift.
Not exact—
a waking dream of India,
brazen as a blue-skinned god
rank with rotting marigolds
or silent on a riverbank:
the Hooghli in Calcutta—
sludge-gray, chest-deep water
blossoming with saris.
Young matrons bathe together,
an old man squats and strains near
a woman filling copper jugs.
A bloated ox, stiff legs up,
slips by under sail,
a vulture on its belly
coiled in slick entrails.
We linger on a bridge,
transfixed by the blind beak
gently teasing white from pink.
The rotting vessel
slowly shrinks,
then floats out of view.
What corpse am I
scavenging for you?
§
You’re offering me a metaphor?
But—we were there.
You’re looking for something more.
What is it?
I’m not sure.
We have other lives now.
This isn’t a betrayal.
How can you tell?
§
Twenty years ago, you woke me
in a hut near Brujenkhola
reeking smoky thatch and goat dung.
Beyond the unglazed window,
full night on the valley floor,
featureless, obscure—
but you pointed to the sky.
Your shoulder pressed mine.
A triangle of coral light
hovered in the blue-black dark:
the mountain
we’d walked days to see,
fish-tailed Machha Puchhare,
flaring like a sun
an hour before dawn.
We lay on our bedrolls,
awake, and watched the light grow.
Later, after clay-red tea,
we gathered up our packs,
paid our host and said goodbye.
The inn-keeper’s deaf daughter
waved, chasing her sister,
as we started for the river.
Ten minutes to a narrow bridge
across the Seti Khola,
wooden slats half rotted—
cables frayed, too far apart
to grab with our arms out.
We had to walk a line of boards
nailed loosely down the center,
bisecting our vision
of pale-green glacial water
in its bed of chalky boulders
more than twenty feet below us.
You tapped your toe
against each plank
and made your way across,
agile as a gymnast,
hands see-sawing for balance.
After heart-stopping seconds,
you yelled above the rapids’ roar
Wait there and dropped your pack.
Faster, you retraced your steps
to bring me back,
coaxing from three yards ahead,
Take a step—
now take another.
Don’t look at the river.
Head throbbing,
I stepped staring
at the battered boots
that moved in jerks
above the milky current:
one foot, then the other,
stepped—and stepped again—
until I stepped on land.
We shouted and kissed there,
laughing as we sprawled on shore
guzzling water,
brown and iodine-bitter.
Soon we were singing,
climbing the stony track
through thick rhododendron,
juniper, yew.
By noon, dry and dizzy,
we trudged into a clearing
where an angel was waiting
in a whorl of dusty sunlight.
Poised on the ridgeline,
a shirtless boy, eight or nine—
beautiful despite one blind-blue eye—
held out a bowl of oranges
Suntalla, sahib?
and they glowed like gold.
We bought as many as he’d sell,
tore away the bitter skins
with stinging fingertips.
Back to back
in the shade of a banyan,
we sat eating oranges
as if nothing could harm us,
no crossing part us.
§
You’re policing failures.
We spent fourteen years together—
And the next fourteen apart.
Which proves the first a failure?
You forget that you loved
someone else for most of that time.
I loved you.
And—
I was eighteen when we met.
I was a child too.
Now you’re close to fifty.
Why don’t you forgive me?
—Jody Bolz
.
Jody Bolz was born in Washington, DC, and attended Cornell University, where she studied with A.R. Ammons. After receiving her MFA, she worked as a journalist for two major conservation organizations (The Wilderness Society and The Nature Conservancy) and taught creative writing for more than 20 years at George Washington University. Her poems have appeared widely in such magazines as The American Scholar, Indiana Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, Poetry East, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, and Southern Poetry Review—and in many literary anthologies. Among her honors is a Rona Jaffe Foundation writer’s award. She edits the journal Poet Lore, founded in 1889, and is the author of A Lesson in Narrative Time (Gihon Books, 2004).