154 Music poems

A tap of your finger on the drum releases all sounds and initiates the new harmony. A step of yours is the conscription of the new men and their marching orders. You look away: the new love! You look back,—the new love! “Change our fates, shoot down the plagues, beginning with time,” the children sing to you. “Build wherever you can the substance of our fortunes and our wishes,” they beg you. Arriving from always, you’ll go away everywhere.

Nature, which is the vast creation’s soul, That steady curious agent in the whole, The art of Heaven, the order of this frame, Is only number in another name. For as some king conqu’ring what was his own, Hath choice of several titles to his crown; So harmony on this score now, that then, Yet still is all that takes and governs men. Beauty is but composure, and we find Content is but the concord of the mind, Friendship the unison of well-turned hearts, Honor the chorus of the noblest parts, And all the world on which we can reflect Music to th’ear, or to the intellect. If then each man a little world must be, How many worlds are copied out in thee, Who art so richly formed, so complete T’epitomize all that is good and great; Whose stars this brave advantage did impart, Thy nature’s as harmonious as thy art? Thou dost above the poets’ praises live, Who fetch from thee th’eternity they give. And as true reason triumphs over sense, Yet is subjected to intelligence: So poets on the lower world look down, But Lawes on them; his height is all his own. For, like Divinity it self, his lyre Rewards the wit it did at first inspire. And thus by double right poets allow His and their laurel should adorn his brow. Live then, great soul of nature, to assuage The savage dulness of this sullen age. Charm us to sense; for though experience fail And reason too, thy numbers may prevail. Then, like those ancients, strike, and so command All nature to obey thy gen’rous hand. None will resist but such who needs will be More stupid than a stone, a fish, a tree. Be it thy care our age to new-create: What built a world may sure repair a state.

In white pleated trousers, peering through green sunshades, looking for the way the sun is red noise, how locusts hiss to replicate the sun. What is the visual equivalent of syncopation? Rows of seared palms wrinkle in the heat waves through green glass. Sprinklers tick, tick, tick. The Watts Towers aim to split the sky into chroma, spires tiled with rubble nothing less than aspiration. I’ve left minarets for sun and syncopation, sixty-seven shades of green which I have counted, beginning: palm leaves, front and back, luncheon pickle, bottle glass, etcetera. One day I will comprehend the different grades of red. On that day I will comprehend these people, rhythms, jazz, Simon Rodia, Watts, Los Angeles, aspiration.

Methought a sweet sound from the street uprose,— And as I pause, and strive again to hear, ‘St Patrick’s Day’ draws softly to its close, And ‘Jordan’s’ waves flow sweetly to my ear, What though from humble source the chorus floats? Music is music, and I listen still; I have ‘an ear’, — ay,two! — Even jews-harp notes Pass current with me, hear them where I will, A slight Italian boy, with jetty hair Shading dark eyes, grinds out the melody, Pulverized music! — In his garb and air I read of sunnier lands beyond the sea, And, dreaming, wander to a fairer clime, Recalled, too suddenly, by — ‘If you please, a dime!’

One died, and the soul was wrenched out Of the other in life, who, walking the streets Wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on The same corners, volumetrics, shadows Under trees. Farther than anyone was ever Called, through increasingly suburban airs And ways, with autumn falling over everything: The plush leaves the chattels in barrels Of an obscure family being evicted Into the way it was, and is. The other beached Glimpses of what the other was up to: Revelations at last. So they grew to hate and forget each other. So I cradle this average violin that knows Only forgotten showtunes, but argues The possibility of free declamation anchored To a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself In November, with the spaces among the days More literal, the meat more visible on the bone. Our question of a place of origin hangs Like smoke: how we picnicked in pine forests, In coves with the water always seeping up, and left Our trash, sperm and excrement everywhere, smeared On the landscape, to make of us what we could.

Full of light and music, the beating air. Light like a bird, Calvino says, not a feather. Over the water the shags come in to land All wings, uh-ohing over the cliffs. Rock, their nests, and bare the rookeries. Blue eye, blue eye, the wind plays fast and sharp. They lift and ride and do not pick their fights. Oh, blue sky, blue day. Heart Of muscle, thrumming down, and swift.

The pianist Joe Sullivan, jamming sound against idea hard as it can go florid and dangerous slams at the beat, or hovers, drumming, along its spikes; in his time almost the only one of them to ignore the chance of easing down, walking it leisurely, he’ll strut, with gambling shapes, underpinning by James P., amble, and stride over gulfs of his own leaving, perilously toppling octaves down to where the chords grow fat again and ride hard-edged, most lucidly voiced, and in good inversions even when the piano seems at risk of being hammered the next second into scrap. For all that, he won’t swing like all the others; disregards mere continuity, the snakecharming business, the ‘masturbator’s rhythm’ under the long variations: Sullivan can gut a sequence in one chorus— —approach, development, climax, discard— and sound magnanimous. The mannerism of intensity often with him seems true, too much to be said, the mood pressing in right at the start, then running among stock forms that could play themselves and moving there with such quickness of intellect that shapes flaw and fuse, altering without much sign, concentration so wrapped up in thoroughness it can sound bluff, bustling, just big-handed stuff— belied by what drives him in to make rigid, display, shout and abscond, rather than just let it come, let it go— And that thing is his mood: a feeling violent and ordinary that runs in among standard forms so wrapped up in clarity that fingers following his through figures that sound obvious find corners everywhere, marks of invention, wakefulness; the rapid and perverse tracks that ordinary feelings make when they get driven hard enough against time.

Act II, Scene iv, Air IV—Cotillion

Act I, Scene viii, Air X—“Thomas, I Cannot,”

Act I, Scene xiii, Air XVI—“Over the Hills, and Far Away”