SYNOPSIS

I

We hear a heart murmur. We see the centaur: half-writer, half-desk. He tells us that the only way he has to understand what happened to him is by re-creating it as a story (“It’s like a murmur/inside my head/and never stops/a rustle, dead leaves/and there is someone/treading on them”). We see a man, and his wife. The man can’t bear staying at home and decides he has to go “there, to him.” His wife despairs (“there’s no ‘there’”). The heartbeat becomes a clock ticking. The man cannot accept that time goes on after what happened to them (“It’s impossible/that we/that the sun/the clocks/the moon/the couples…the blood in our veins”). The clock stops. The man and the woman sing of the night when messengers came to tell them about their son (“And they/mercifully/quietly/stood there and/gave us/the breath/of death”). The man leaves the house and walks in ever widening circles until reaching the hills outside the town (“Here I fall/I do not fall”). The woman who stayed at home now leaves and climbs to the town’s belfry, from where she watches the procession walking towards a barren hill (“Atop a belfry/I walk alone now/in circles…While he/on the hilltops/facing me/days, nights/orbits/his own circle.”) The walking man conjures up his son: he urges him to enter his own body so the son can live the rest of his unlived life (“Quick, my child/my eyelids tremble!/Quick/devour/be deep/be sad...Quick, my child/Dawn is rising!”).

Interlude

The centaur tells how some of the townsfolk who are also bereaved see the walking man, leave their homes, and follow him: a midwife, her husband the cobbler, a woman in a net, an old math teacher.

II

We hear a cry piercing the skies. There is no answer, only a faint echo. The walking man hovers between here and there (“Walking my mind away”). The music turns into a mantra from which the centaur emerges, asking questions of the walkers who are mourners (“When you meet them/if you meet them/what will you tell them?”). The walking man continues (“Perhaps this walk itself/is both the riddle and its answer”). The woman atop the belfry sees her husband far away and blesses him (Go now/be like him/conceive him/yet be your death, too...and there, my love/will come peace – for him/for you”). One of the walkers meditates upon a fly caught in a web, the unfathomable web of life. Giant drums interrupt. The man hollers a string of questions to his son (“Where?/Where are you, my son?/And who are you there?/And how are you there?”). The stars mock his questions.

III

A cry pierces the skies. There is no answer. Only a faint echo. We hear the voice of a boy (“there is breath/there is breath/inside the pain/there is/breath”).

Silkroad is grateful to the members of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, for their partnership in the development of this work. Silkroad's commission of Falling Out of Time is made possible thanks in part to support from the Alice L. Walton Foundation and the Barr Foundation.

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