Awaiting
Conceptual artist Charisse Pearlina Weston’s experimental verse drama Awaiting offers a snowstorm of ideas swirling around memory, silence, time, and darkness.
A nameless woman is the main speaker. Her high rhetoric evokes the tragic and the heroic in phrases unstintingly wrought. Luscious images meet a forward-thrumming musicality, as in
stolen glimpses
from across
a subway car up
between dearly parted
thighs into a heady dark
that reads as lilac wine
inaugurating the burst flesh
Accompanying the woman is an ensemble character, “the children,” described as “the muted chorus,” that enacts silence with beguiling vigor, as when “the children listen through their eyes,” or later “leave / behind their ears, encircled by curled fingers, / to listen to the widening dark.”
An invisible narrator and an ambiguous figure called “Vision” round out the dramatis personae. The latter is the center of Awaiting’s final scene:
Vision steps above himself from behind,
crouches beside the bed of daffodils
and presses his fingers beneath a woman
into the moist earth from which a bouquet grew.
he sprinkles its flame, its smoke, and its ash on the body
of a woman
and the children hum, arms encircled, out of sync,
because they have harmoniously forgotten
the wholeness of themselves as the chorus.
The ritualistic quality of Vision’s actions mimics the incantatory repetition of Weston’s language, such as when she writes
a woman does not care.
a woman does not whimper
a woman does not see only what is in front of her:
the future ignited in history.
Indeed, the author elsewhere suggests time is traversed spatially: a “space chopping hour / doubles / and minutes crinkle,” where life occurs “in the aftermath of vacated time.”