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Based on Jean Cocteau's film "The Eternal Return", this song is yet another telling of the love between Tristan and Isolde.

lyrics

Patrice
(Thanks to Cocteau’s “The Eternal Return” based on Tristan & Isolde)

Beyond being golden, an Aryan
Innocence made rare…
Beyond woods, fields, the untellable
Pastoral to which you brought me
Over waves, the graves of parents…
I knew, like a sleepwalker I knew
The dream of our days
Would be shaken & torn…

First a drunkard’s tempest came:
The furious cognac flung to smash behind my head,
His knuckles on the skull, twisting hair,
Pressing down, the spilled liquor
Mopping my face ‘til you stepped in.
Patrice, even then I knew
To escape would prove fatal,
Though still I yearned, still I went along.

Next there was an elixir, a love potion, the good intentions
Of a friend twisted malevolently
By the dwarf, Achilles’, unknowing fingers….
What of it, our luck, since it wasn’t poison
Though that’s what the bottle
Prescribed?

It might as well have been, & us,
Victims still, fortunate for the spell
We would have felt anyway.

How on earth to escape this----
When you meant me for your Uncle,
When I signed that contract & its dangerous
Terrain-----
Two houses in one dwelling, a castle of cards
Where the Queens looked away, & then privately
Plotting, with menace, looked on?

So we ran away, we ran never planning,
We ran & I remember…
I remember your hands in the warmth of evening
Mist, the pond lapping, the frogs…& I remember
Your bird call, the signal I woke to, delirious
On the mountain where my husband Marc,
Your uncle, came after, came after…

Abandonment, betrayal-----
Who but I could do it…
Going. Going back as if hog-tied,
Broken, your whisper now the seas’
Breath imprinting my mouth?

For a month I felt it, hearing, bed-bound,
A nightingale’s song. Was it you?
I was moved to different windows
& the walls of the rooms sealed me up
like a shot glass.

Drunk, I drowned
& the business left only one
Reprieve: to go where, wounded,
You lay, the torment at last still,
& gladly, for I am glad,
Shipwrecked,
Lie down.

Natalie, your parents, like mine,
are here, & are finished.

credits

from Whispers of Arias (II), released December 24, 2012

license

all rights reserved

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about

Stephen Mead image

Stephen Mead Albany, New York

A resident of NY, Stephen Mead is a published outsider artist, writer, maker of short-collage films and sound-collage downloads. If you are at all interested please place his name in any search engine in conjunction with any of the above-mentioned genres for links to his multimedia work and merchandise. To order CDs via VISA or PayPal please visit stephenmeadmusic.weebly.com ... more

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