154 Music poems

When I met Vivaldi it was dark, a ragman lashed his horse’s bells, streets tilted into slow wind tunnels, no, it was another night, in winter, snow as soft as opium, two winoes wassailed down an alley through a milk truck’s ruts, in the subways a violin was whistling down chrome tracks, past cobalt semaphores, rats and pennies underneath the 3rd rail . . . Has it never been so quiet that you’ve heard the manhole covers rumble when the El goes overhead? Icicles growing? Could you tell the difference between the sound of filaments in light bulbs burning down, and a dulcimer played in a padded cell? A meager music hovers everywhere: at mouths of drains, echoing stairwells where girls in muslin disappear whispering “allegro.” When I closed my eyes, less than a ghost, Vivaldi cupped a mouth harp like a match against the wind.

Rain so dark I can’t get through— train going by in a hurry. The voice said walk or die, I walked,—the train and the voice all blurry. I walked with my bones and my heart of chalk, not even a splintered notion: days of thought, nights of worry,—lonesome train in a hurry.

I Oh Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find! I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind; But although I take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy mind! II Here you come with your old music, and here's all the good it brings. What, they lived once thus at Venice where the merchants were the kings, Where Saint Mark's is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings? III Ay, because the sea's the street there; and 'tis arched by . . . what you call . . . Shylock's bridge with houses on it, where they kept the carnival: I was never out of England—it's as if I saw it all. IV Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May? Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day, When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say? V Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red,— On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed, O'er the breast's superb abundance where a man might base his head? VI Well, and it was graceful of them—they'd break talk off and afford —She, to bite her mask's black velvet—he, to finger on his sword, While you sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord? VII What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh, Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions—"Must we die?" Those commiserating sevenths—"Life might last! we can but try! VIII "Were you happy?" —"Yes."—"And are you still as happy?"—"Yes. And you?" —"Then, more kisses!"—"Did I stop them, when a million seemed so few?" Hark, the dominant's persistence till it must be answered to! IX So, an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say! "Brave Galuppi! that was music! good alike at grave and gay! "I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play!" X Then they left you for their pleasure: till in due time, one by one, Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone, Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun. XI But when I sit down to reason, think to take my stand nor swerve, While I triumph o'er a secret wrung from nature's close reserve, In you come with your cold music till I creep thro' every nerve. XII Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned: "Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned. "The soul, doubtless, is immortal—where a soul can be discerned. XIII "Yours for instance: you know physics, something of geology, "Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree; "Butterflies may dread extinction,—you'll not die, it cannot be! XIV "As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop, "Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop: "What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop? XV "Dust and ashes!" So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold. Dear dead women, with such hair, too—what's become of all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.

The song is Gaelic now, peridot words the color of fresh timothy gathered by red-haired women; or the song is the bony white oak and rhythm of Miwu, a knowing that breathes against angles of granite and meets the ground in a flurry of sound. Or the song rides down from a star over burgundy boulders beneath a dazzling blue sky to find the old words buried deep in the earth. But this heart listens. This song.Hi-tsah-tsi-nah, the precious rain awakening. On this you come as a prayer in the flesh, on this you ride with the roll and rollick of rattlesnake. On this you sing volcanic birthing words and obsidian cools where the blood bubbles down. Oh look, a little girl is lost although she stands close to her mother’s heart. With great energy she scrapes the missionaries from her ribs. Shoulder blades curve around the spine and the pestle dances, acorns flying, and dust collects in the creases of her hands. Or she is kneeling in a small room at the edge of the mesa, polished black bone of earth, cherished piki stone, moving back and forth this act of love, grinding the corn until it is dark, brushing the white cornmeal into one basket, the blue into another, thinking already of the daughters she will bear glowing in the sun. Or she is standing at the bog inside a mountain meadow, hands raised up to tie back her hair with a thin red rag; seeds loosen and cling to her shoes, her stockings, her long skirt, her skin. She fearlessly walks through gold fiddleneck, small mountain lupines, clouds of white popcorn flowers fallen upward out of the ground to cover the hillside like snow. Or a woman gathers loop after loop of heavy rope to guide the head of the horse she straddles and sometimes she is the mare and the soft sandstone and the hot rocks rolling in acorn soup, trying to heal the gash spread across her path where the crescent moon has sliced the earth. Ocean to mountain to mesa, the bundle she carries is a sacred memory, a rainbow that arches from one side of the sky to the other. Or a woman is closing a steamer trunk, has to sit on it hard to get the latch through and the leather buckled; seagulls dive outside the wall of the ship, she hears their demands, maybe one has come inside to brush her cheek with its pointed wing or maybe just another tear warmed by cooling blood. How she aches in the cold, she is so thin; and when she pulls the blanket around her and lies down on the floor, she is no more than a pile of old rags, a few sticks of firewood, a broken broom. Steady against the roll of the sea she is patient as the rocks that wait for the ship along a northern corridor, angry as the storms midway across the Atlantic that shake their fists at those who must leave home, and as deeply hidden as the icebergs that threaten to disembowl. She has already seen the world dissolve; now she feels the breaking of one last thread to ancestral land, feels the very break of it.

For Eardrum First hold the needle like a lover’s hand Lower it slowly let it tongue the record’s ear Then cultivate the sweet beats blooming in the valley of the groove Laugh at folks that make requests What chef would let the diners determine Which entrees make up the menu? Young boys think it’s about flashy flicks of the wrist But it’s about filling the floor with the manic language of dance About knowing the beat of every record like a mama knows her child’s cries Nobody cares how fast you scratch Cuz it ain’t about soothing any itch It’s about how many hairstyles are still standing At the end of the night.

If it’s true that Johnny Weismuller stole his Tarzan yell from the Alpine yodel, did Hank Williams in the back seat of his Cadillac dream the ululation of Bedouin women welcoming the horsemen back from war? When I was a boy only a fool would fake a country sound, and my father made his voice over to ring as simple as Jack Parr’s Midwest porkless, yamless, no-cornbread-or-cracklin’ patter. He didn’t want to be from Butts County, Georgia, and hated farm chores and coveralls. Football got him out. The FBI gave him a way to travel under cover, but I have heard him, years later, after choir practice and the church social, sit back with a Pall Mall and follow Eight-Finger Fleming’s banjo frail. He’d hold that smoke deep, his ash glowing till his throat was bathed in tar, and then he’d cut loose and scroll it out, a yodel to make Roy Rogers blush. It was no hymn, I’ll tell you. We had a brick split-level in the suburbs, and the radio station of choice adored Perry Como’s croon. My mother adopted words like boocoo and oodles to mask her peach-orchard drawl. An uncle might tell a farmer’s daughter joke, the rake fleeing the cocked shotgun stopping on a hill to yodel, “Andyouroldladytoo,” but nobody could say ain’t or you’uns or I’ll get to it directly

If my fingers could twang the guitar as before they would not be what they are and neither would I. I would be back in young-time. Incline towards me, Gwendolyn, this Monday, and lend me your ear while I loll on my pillows to turn your songs from strings into tin.

Two guitars were left in a room all alone They sat on different corners of the parlor In this solitude they started talking to each other My strings are tight and full of tears The man who plays me has no heart I have seen it leave out of his mouth I have seen it melt out of his eyes It dives into the pores of the earth When they squeeze me tight I bring Down the angels who live off the chorus The trios singing loosen organs With melodious screwdrivers Sentiment comes off the hinges Because a song is a mountain put into Words and landscape is the feeling that Enters something so big in the harmony We are always in danger of blowing up With passion The other guitar: In 1944 New York When the Trio Los Panchos started With Mexican & Puerto Rican birds I am the one that one of them held Tight    like a woman Their throats gardenia gardens An airport for dreams I've been in theaters and cabarets I played in an apartment on 102nd street After a baptism pregnant with women The men flirted and were offered Chicken soup Echoes came out of hallways as if from caves Someone is opening the door now The two guitars hushed and there was a Resonance in the air like what is left by The last chord of a bolero.

One was fire red, Hand carved and new— The local maker pried the wood From a torn-down church's pew, The Devil's instrument Wrenched from the house of God. It answered merrily and clear Though my fingering was flawed; Bright and sharp as a young wine, They said, but it would mellow, And that I would grow into it. The other one was yellow And nicked down at the chin, A varnish of Baltic amber, A one-piece back of tiger maple And a low, dark timbre. A century old, they said, Its sound will never change. Rich and deep on G and D, Thin on the upper range, And how it came from the Old World Was anybody's guess— Light as an exile's suitcase, A belly of emptiness: That was the one I chose (Not the one of flame) And teachers would turn in their practiced hands To see whence the sad notes came.

A grand piano wrapped in quilted pads by movers, tied up with canvas straps—like classical music’s birthday gift to the criminally insane—is gently nudged without its legs out an eighth-floor window on 62nd street. It dangles in April air from the neck of the movers’ crane, Chopin-shiny black lacquer squares and dirty white crisscross patterns hanging like the second-to-last note of a concerto played on the edge of the seat, the edge of tears, the edge of eight stories up going over—it's a piano being pushed out of a window and lowered down onto a flatbed truck!— and I’m trying to teach math in the building across the street. Who can teach when there are such lessons to be learned? All the greatest common factors are delivered by long-necked cranes and flatbed trucks or come through everything, even air. Like snow. See, snow falls for the first time every year, and every year my students rush to the window as if snow were more interesting than math, which, of course, it is. So please. Let me teach like a Steinway, spinning slowly in April air, so almost-falling, so hinderingly dangling from the neck of the movers’ crane. So on the edge of losing everything. Let me teach like the first snow, falling.