Charles Baxter

To be free of situations, To live from day to day without events And to be free from the need to narrate them. One small detail, the blossoming crab apple, For example, on the lengthening boulevard Of the stanza, this very one, That parallels the perturbation of the waves Mid-April—the Mississippi flowing above the locks Of Minneapolis, once called St. Anthony— Two blocks away, the river high with snowmelt, And where this morning I heard the call Of what I took to be a sparrow, white-throated, The leap of a minor third Two octaves above middle C. Four birds outside this afternoon. Four distinct calls In a dispirited late daylight. And you? “You”? Waiting to experience a moment That has no precedent. The wish to be a child, Or the wish to be outside of time, The craving, that is, for a kind of death In which one stays somehow alert... Listening to the Schumann Violin Concerto: Written in that last period as he descended into the madness Brought on by syphilis when he heard the singing Of the angels, this piece was thought to be unplayable Until the metronome markings were ignored; In the second movement a brief passage comes and goes Like the frenzied clustering of bees, pure monotony, Like madness gathering its forces. Clara, Schumann’s wife, Asked that the piece never be performed, but one musician Said of his music that all madness contains a kind Of vulgarity, but even after he went insane, Schumann’s music retained that odd nobility. Outside, sounds of traffic, a woman’s cry from down the street. Idea for a frightening story: Last week I heard a scream so distant that it Had lost its call-to-rescue and its horror—dim vehemence, Like an auto accident seen from a train, The blood grown small, and the outcries As soundless as a branch in wind, Or like a child in snow straggling behind his parents, The drifts so deep he has trouble making headway, Being five years old, and so he calls out to them, “Hold!” because he cannot think of the proper word— Probably “Wait” or “Stop,”—and when they hear Him begging them to slow down and to wait for him, They turn around to laugh. Their laughter makes the child Sad and enraged, so he stops to cry, Whereupon his parents, still amused, bring out a camera To snap a picture of him as he wails. He understands that his unhappiness Was a diversion to them both, that they were bored By children and therefore found him comical, So there they are, laughing with delight. Today, sixty years later, he is Photographed, bundled in his winter coat. Oh, and the bored laughter, behind the camera, And the impossibility, the inconsequence Of any sympathy.

Please marry me. Your mother likes me. —Line spoken by an unknown woman, in a dream We are stretched out on a dingy sofa, and I think I must be barefoot because a woman whom no one knows Is massaging the ankle of one leg of mine and the instep Of the other, all this toward morning, and I have that Occasional epiphany one has while still asleep That I am floating down a river Because I am so happy and all the dismal issues Have been made tractable at last, and so I say to her That the late symphonies of Gustav Mahler Are more lucid if you’re sitting close to, and above, The orchestra, so that you can see the contrapuntal Lines moving from strings to woodwinds And then back again, whereupon this woman, Sitting (I now realize) at my feet, says, in the full Heat of our dream life, and in that happiness, “Please marry me. Your mother likes me,” And so I wake, not laughing, although my mother Has been dead for over thirty years, but in wonderment Over what quality this dream-woman must have owned To have pleased my mother so that she, My late mother, would have said, despite her ban On ordinary pleasantries, that she had liked someone, Anyone, who might have cared for me, and as I lie In bed I think of the last movement of Mahler’s Ninth When the melodic lines go quiet for minute after minute In a prolonged farewell to music and to life, Which my mother would attend to in her bathrobe Late at night, the stereo turned up, blended whiskey In her highball glass mixed with milk as a disguise, Leaning back, hand over eyes, silent-movie style Like Norma Desmond listening as Von Stroheim plays The organ wearing his white gloves. No, it wasn’t Mahler, it was Schoenberg,Verklärte Nacht, Moon-drunk music, mad and inconsolable.