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in Riddles, for Mary * How many suns will cross its coign before the last freeze? What pennywhistle spun its point on the glass breeze? Whose airs are loosened in the pane like miniature degrees, where breath condenses into rain among the apple trees? Here tesserae have turned to earth, here blossoms may attend to birth as sun becoming leaves; here branches seem to lead the glass, whose scenes compose as seasons pass, the lifetime, piece by piece.... A sphere * Begins and ends: suppose, as glaciers drop their catch, as memory’s a ragged seine, as grain by grain a dead morraine the sky is softly sifting ash, as constellations each rescind to embers, umbral lees—alas, the crown lens will surely tear to end the long, sweet refrain of sun to moon to sun again, of E from M C2— and then what breath once shaped the pane may lose itself (we pray) in airs our children, too, had breathed in time, and theirs, and theirs. * If oracles recall in riddles orreries in orreries, the quantum of the apple’s arc the piper’s tune, the dancer’s turning crown of sonnets in the dark by starlight ground between the querns spun withershins of dawn and dusk to wreathe a green and weathered earth— it’s moonshine, love, and loneliness. Do looney jigs unwind the suns? Might jugglers drop them every one? Are seeds resewn, or tales respun? When pipers stop to play the bones the very stones are left undone. * To please the Sphinx all life unreels through black magnetic stone-strewn fields where pitchblende blinks its slow decay tic-tic-tic de-lightedly by alpha, beta, gamma, delta— time dilates and starlight bends in gravity like roundelays. All light, partic- ulate, licks out one way, in waves; electric clouds expand in spheres whose uncracked shells concentrically unrecalled across the parsecs and the years ring out, shift red (like Hell), disperse the edges of the universe— * Eclectic quarks a dish collects to parse into initial text— miraculous, exotic sky!— a Book of Kells whose quirkish tale in optical if stale effects is mirrored in the lemur’s eye, as through the hatchling’s candled egg comes first light to the cockerel— As Sol dissolves against the clock, and seismographic needles track, and continents incline to raft, uranium sines off to lead or raindrops pock a full carafe to lilypads inside the head— * Assymmetries: no wave contracts—

at  first  she  thinks  the  attraction  does not fill  her  with  enough  blood ,  but with  a  thing  like  the  dove —    White and coloured feathers   —   Bones  unlike  her  own bones  that  gravity  can’t  pull  down  ,  a milky  thing unlike   the  seas .           Fills her  with    a                      wind —    Starch  rustle  of the quick passing  of    things  ,  then    silence   afterwards of  the  things that passed —    that gave the wind its  sound      ,   not       unlike     what   split the fireworks  in  the  high  school  park   into   fanning particles of  flame .    The   peacock    that      is  the   world ,         bird of       breathing  colour    between  them —    Bird that  is  everything to  choose from   —   or the one thing  , sacred bone of the particular    —

Touched by your goodness, I am like that grand piano we found one night on Willoughby that someone had smashed and somehow heaved through an open window. And you might think by this I mean I’m broken or abandoned, or unloved.   Truth is, I don’t know exactly what I am, any more than the wreckage in the alley knows it’s a piano, filling with trash and yellow leaves. Maybe I’m all that’s left of what I was. But touching me, I know, you are the good breeze blowing across its rusted strings. What would you call that feeling when the wood, even with its cracked harp, starts to sing?

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings. In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide. So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

Her wattled fingers can’t stroke the keys with much grace or assurance anymore, and the tempo is always rubato, halting, but still that sound—notes quivering and clear in their singularity, filing down the hallway— aches with pure intention, the melody somehow prettier as a remnant than whatever it used to be.

When the corpse revived at the funeral, The outraged mourners killed it; and the soul Of the revenant passed into the body Of the poet because it had more to say. He sat down at the piano no one could play Called Messiah, or The Regulator of the World, Which had stood for fifty years, to my knowledge, Beneath a painting of a red-haired woman In a loose gown with one bared breast, and played A posthumous work of the composer S—— About the impotence of God (I believe) Who has no power not to create everything. It was the Autumn of the year and wet, When the music started.  The musician was Skillful but the Messiah was out of tune And bent the time and the tone.  For a long hour The poet played The Regulator of the World As the spirit prompted, and entered upon The pathways of His power—while the mourners Stood with slow blood on their hands Astonished by the weird processional And the undertaker figured his bill. —We have in mind an unplayed instrument Which stands apart in a memorial air Where the room darkens toward its inmost wall And a lady hangs in her autumnal hair At evening of the November rains; and winds Sublime out of the North, and North by West, Are sowing from the death-sack of the seed The burden of her cloudy hip.  Behold, I send the demon I know to relieve your need, An imperfect player at the perfect instrument Who takes in hand The Regulator of the World To keep the splendor from destroying us. Lady!  The last virtuoso of the composer S—— Darkens your parlor with the music of the Law. When I was green and blossomed in the Spring I was mute wood.  Now I am dead I sing.

For Frances Dillon Hayward 1 Such splendid icecaps and hard rills, such weights And counter-weights, I think I scale the heights When pentatonic Chinese crewmen start Up in a cold sweat from the bottom of the keyboard Only to arrive at some snow-stormed valley To dissolve in steam-holes and vanish out of sight. 2 The left hand’s library is dull, the books All read, though sometimes, going under velvet, An old upholsterer will spit out tacks, Turn them into sparks and smartly hurl them Up and down the loudest bowling alley— His pressure of effects can last all night. 3 Two bird notes endlessly repeat themselves. Or are they fish scales—iridescent, hard? Mica into marble back to mica? No images in trills. They’re formal. Take Your foot off the pedal. You’re in a wood Near the sea. And every tree and wave is fake. 4 An underwater haircut by Debussy? Oh, that’s too easy. Astringent lotions Let the swimmer down by easy stages Down among the flashy soda fountains Down to the bottom where the light bulbs waver Down where all the mirrors eat their hearts out. 5 Grammar becoming poetry is what You’re after—say, a rational derangement Requiring that you forget technique And concentrate on what is harder like A fireplace that burns pine needles only, Before which spills the gore of Persian rugs. 6 A vial of antiseptic meant for Schubert, One modest, flat meticulous translation Of Chopin’s lightning undercurrent Spanish— These are the mere necessities of travel. Someone you must meet is Dr. Czerny. Then, through him, Domenico Scarlatti. 7 Seizure are occurring. Despite snow-lightning, The black keys are bent on mountain climbing— All of it against a doctor’s warning. Soon they’re descending like the black dots of A wirephoto in transmission. An Erotic black wing hovers up above. 8 Bach is more like opening an ember And digging hard into the heart of fire. The heart of fire is another fire. When it comes to Mozart, just say nothing. Think of it as milk, and drink it slowly. Slowly you will taste the cream of angels. 9 This black and white’s deceptive. Underneath The spectrum rages. Did you ever see The calmest waters quickly come to life Because a minnow’s tinfoil flash in sun Had rent them suddenly? It came. And went. We take two thousand takes before we print. 10 Don’t try to catch that lion by Rousseau. Before you wake, he’ll eat you up. If you Should meet the sleeping gypsy, let her sleep. Tomorrow they’ll be gone without a trace, Half fact and half enigma. Now your hands Are on the mysteries of the commonplace.

After Erik Satie For an hour I forgot my fat self, my neurotic innards, my addiction to alignment. For an hour I forgot my fear of rain. For an hour I was a salamander shimmying through the kelp in search of shore, and under his fingers the notes slid loose from my belly in a long jellyrope of eggs that took root in the mud. And what would hatch, I did not know— a lie. A waltz. An apostle of glass. For an hour I stood on two legs and ran. For an hour I panted and galloped. For an hour I was a maple tree, and under the summer of his fingers the notes seeded and winged away

How can we believe he did it— every day—for all those years? We remember how the musicians gathered for him—and the prostitutes arranged themselves the way he wanted— and even the helmeted monkeys with their little toy car cerebella— posed—and the fish on the plate— remained after he ate the fish— Bones—What do we do with this life?—except announce:Joy. Joy.Joy—from the lead— to the oil—to the stretch of bright canvas—stretched—to the end of it all.

I watched him swinging the pick in the sun, breaking the concrete steps into chunks of rock, and the rocks into dust, and the dust into earth again. I must have sat for a very long time on the split rail fence, just watching him. My father’s body glistened with sweat, his arms flew like dark wings over his head. He was turning the backyard into terraces, breaking the hill into two flat plains. I took for granted the power of him, though it frightened me, too. I watched as he swung the pick into the air and brought it down hard and changed the shape of the world, and changed the shape of the world again.