TOYS IN A FIELD: SONGS FROM DIEN CAI DAU (2018)
2Fl/picc.ob.EH.BbCl.BCl.Bsn.Cbn.
2FHn.2CTpt.Tbn.Tb.
4perc.hp.pno
tenor solo
8.8.6.6.4
Dur. 15’
Perusal material available
Winner of the Arthur Friedman Prize
First performance 23 april 2018
The Juilliard Orchestra
Maestro Jeffrey Milarsky
Matthew Pearce, tenor
Text by Yusef Komunyakaa, permission generously granted by Wesleyan University Press
Recounting his experience of the Vietnam War ex post facto, Komunyakaa mixes a sense of detachment wrought by a decade of time with the excruciating and at times disarmingly beautiful circumstances and images of his then-reality. Musically, the orchestra acts as an extension of the voice, only briefly resisting its magnetism in the second movement. Otherwise, the vocal line is almost constantly refracted, doubled, echoed, etc. by the orchestra. As the poet does in his work, I sparingly incorporate elements of Southeast Asian musics, but they exist more as distant recollections than any sort of faithful reconstruction. Starlight Scope Myopia is narrated from the perspective of a soldier watching Viet Cong in the night from the scope of his weapon. The voice forges ahead in a constantly morphing stream of consciousness as the orchestra twitches and shifts anxiously in and out of focus. We Never Know offers a moment of humanity between a soldier and a just-felled enemy combatant. Echoes and long, stretched out phrases suggest a place of memory. The poem “You and I Are Disappearing” delivers with stunning immediacy the act of passively watching a Vietnamese girl burn alive. The music mechanically moves forward, softening briefly into fantastical shimmering. The music is galvanized again by the terror of reality, and the work’s only orchestral tutti is heard at the end. Toys in a Field returns to the memory-place of the second poem. Over strings and percussion, the singer reminds us what is left behind when war is “over”. –note from first performance
Starlight Scope Myopia
Gray-blue shadows lift
shadows onto an oxcart.
Making night work for us,
the starlight scope brings
men into killing range.
The river under Vi Bridge
takes the heart away
like the Water God
riding his dragon.
Smoke-colored
Viet Cong
move under our eyelids,
lords over loneliness
winding like coral vine through
sandalwood & lotus,
inside our lowered heads
years after this scene
ends. The brain closes
down. What looks like
one step into the trees,
they're lifting crates of ammo
& sacks of rice, swaying
under their shared weight.
Caught in the infrared,
what are they saying?
Are they talking about women
or calling the Americans
beaucoup dien cai dau?
One of them is laughing.
You want to place a finger
to his lips & say "shhhh."
You try reading ghost talk
on their lips. They say
"up-up we go," lifting as one.
This one, old, bowlegged,
you feel you could reach out
& take him in your arms. You
peer down the sights of your M-16,
seeing the full moon
loaded on an oxcart.
We Never Know
He danced with tall grass
for a moment, like he was swaying
with a woman. Our gun barrels
glowed white-hot.
When I got to him,
a blue halo
of flies had already claimed him.
I pulled the crumbled photograph
from his fingers.
There's no other way
to say this: I fell in love.
The morning cleared again,
except for a distant mortar
& somewhere choppers taking off.
I slid the wallet into his pocket
& turned him over, so he wouldn't be
kissing the ground.
“You and I Are Disappearing”
-Björn Håkansson
The cry I bring down from the hills
belongs to a girl still burning
inside my head. At daybreak
she burns like a piece of paper.
She burns like foxfire
in a thigh-shaped valley.
A skirt of flames
dances around her
at dusk.
We stand with our hands
hanging at our sides,
while she burns
like a sack of dry ice.
She burns like oil on water.
She burns like a cattail torch
dipped in gasoline.
She glows like the fat tip
of a banker's cigar,
silent as quicksilver.
A tiger under a rainbow
at nightfall.
She burns like a shot glass of vodka.
She burns like a field of poppies
at the edge of a rain forest.
She rises like dragonsmoke
to my nostrils.
She burns like a burning bush
driven by a godawful wind.
Toys in a Field
Using gun mounts
for monkey bars,
Vietnamese children
play skin-the-cat,
pulling themselves through–
suspended in doorways
of multimillion-dollar helicopters
abandoned in white-elephant
graveyards. With arms
spread-eagled they imitate
vultures landing in fields.
Their play is silent as
distant rain,
the volume turned down
on the six o’clock news,
except for the boy
with American eyes
who keeps singing
rat-a-tat-tat, hugging
a broken machine gun.
All texts taken from Dien Cai Dau © 1988 by Yusef Komunyakaa
All rights reserved
Permission generously granted by Wesleyan University Press