154 Music poems

Act III, Scene xiii, Air XXVII—“Green Sleeves”

To Mr. H. Lawes, On His Airs Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured song First taught our English music how to span Words with just note and accent, not to scan With Midas’ ears, committing short and long, Thy worth and skill exempts thee from the throng, With praise enough for Envy to look wan; To after-age thou shalt be writ the man That with smooth air couldst humor best our tongue. Thou honor’st Verse, and Verse must lend her wing To honor thee, the priest of Phœbus’ choir, That tun’st their happiest lines in hymn or story. Dante shall give Fame leave to set thee higher Than his Casella, whom he wooed to sing, Met in the milder shades of Purgatory.

I Two old men, father-and son-in-law, Liszt and Wagner, are staying by the Grand Canal together with the restless woman who is married to King Midas, he who changes everything he touches to Wagner. The ocean's green cold pushes up through the palazzo floors. Wagner is marked, his famous Punchinello profile looks more tired than before, his face a white flag. The gondola is heavy-laden with their lives, two round trips and a one-way. II A window in the palazzo flies open and everyone grimaces in the sudden draft. Outside on the water the trash gondola appears, paddled by to one-oared bandits. Liszt has written down some chords so heavy, they ought to be sent off to the mineralological institute in Padua for analysis. Meteorites! Too heavy to rest, they can only sink and sink straight through the future all the way down to the Brownshirt years. The gondola is heavy-laden with the future's huddled-up stones. III Peep-holdes into 1990. March 25th. Angst for Lithuania. Dreamt I visited a large hospital. No personnel. Everyone was a patient. In the same dream a newborn girl who spoke in complete sentences. IV Beside the son-in-law, who's a man of the times, Liszt is a moth-eaten grand seigneur. It's a disguise. The deep, that tries on and rejects different masks, has chosen this one just for him— the deep that wants to enter people without ever showing its face. V Abbé Liszt is used to carrying his suitcase himself through sleet and sunshine and when his time comes to die, there will be no one to meet him at the station. A mild breeze of gifted cognac carries him away in the midst of a commission. He always has commissions. Two thousand letters a year! The schoolboy who writes his misspelled word a hundred times before he's allowed to go home. The gondola is heavy-laden with life, it is simple and black. VI Back to 1990. Dreamt I drove over a hundred miles in vain. Then everything magnified. Sparrows as big as hens sang so loud that it briefly struck me deaf. Dreamt I had drawn piano keys on my kitchen table. I played on them, mute. The neighbors came over to listen. VII The clavier, which kept silent through all of Parsifal (but listened), finally has something to say. Sighs...ospiri... When Liszt plays tonight he holds the sea-pedal pressed down so the ocean's green force rises up through the floor and flows together with all the stone in the building. Good evening, beautiful deep! The gondola is heavy-laden with life, it is simple and black. VIII Dreamt I was supposed to start school but arrived too late. Everyone in the room was wearing a white mask. Whoever the teacher was, no one could say.

When I tell you I love the song “Edelweiss” you have to understand that even though I too am a sophisticate who scorns musicals, I was once a little girl who stood in my grand- father’s living room singing,Cuckoo! Cuckoo! while he sipped his scotch and laughed at my preciosity. And when I sing the lyrics in your ear—Small and bright, clean and white, you look happy to meet me — you have to understand my grandfather only ever had one friend, a jeweler who also drank scotch, and left his $10,000 Rolex to my grandfather, who wore it even though it turned his wrist green, wore it to the funeral, where the daughter sang in her ethereal voice.Blossom of snow may you bloom and grow, bloom and grow forever. She couldn’t take her eyes off the casket. You have to understand that my grandfather kept spinning that heavy gold around his wrist, and when he raised his voice to join in, he cried to sing it.Edelweiss, edelweiss, bless my homeland forever.

Bunny Berigan first recorded “I Can’t Get Started” with a small group that included Joe Bushkin, Cozy Cole and Artie Shaw in 1936. Earlier that same year, the song, written by Ira Gershwin and Vernon Duke, and rendered as a duet patter number by Bob Hope and Eve Arden, made its debut on Broadway in The Ziegfeld Follies. By 1937, when Berigan re-recorded it in a big-band setting, “I Can’t” had become his signature song, even though, within a few months, Billie Holiday would record her astonishing version backed by Lester Young and the rest of the Basie Orchestra. Lovers for a time, Lee Wiley and Berigan began appearing together on Wiley’s fifteen-minute CBS radio spot, Saturday Night Swing Club, in 1936. Berigan died from alcoholism-related causes on June 2, 1942. Although “I Can’t Get Started” is perfectly suited to Wiley’s deep phrasing and succinct vibrato, she recorded the ballad only once, informally, in 1945, during a Town Hall performance date. The Spanish Civil War started in 1936 and ended in 1939 with Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s forces entering Madrid. “I’ve settled revolutions in Spain” goes Gershwin’s lyric, just as odd.

My wife wears headphones as she plays Chopin etudes in the winter light. Singing random notes, she sways in and out of shadow while night settles. The keys she presses make a soft clack, the bench creaks when her weight shifts, golden cotton fabric ripples across her shoulders, and the sustain pedal clicks. This is the hidden melody I know so well, her body finding harmony in the give and take of motion, her lyric grace of gesture measured against a slow fall of darkness. Now stillness descends to signal the end of her silent music.

For Ethan Canin I sat on the dock at dusk and spoke to the fish who swam beneath me like ears with fins to hear my secrets. “That words come close?” I whispered. “The sky enters me like a sword with my own hand on the hilt. How to witness what I can't express— the smell of lilacs, the dirge of loons. Make up the rest if you wish. Less is enough. Say I sound like one of the Hosts. That I'm crying also and there's nothing you can do to make me stop. That I'm like the peepers, katydids, and thrush with my own song— all call in the opera of dusk. Or is it response?”

They are not angels though they have the hollow look of beings bred on ether. There’s an air of cool removal from your life, the hawk’s indifference to the hare’s terror. You see it in their palms, raised casually against the fresco’s surface, as to glass of submarine or spacecraft, and you see it in their eyes, oracular, that let you pass alone to unknown agony. The song they sing is merely time.

Ad libitum I sing this body ad libitum, Europe scraped raw between my teeth until,presto, “Ave Maria” floats to the surface from a Tituba 
tributary of “Swanee.” Until I’m a legato darkling whole note, my voice shimmering up from the Atlantic’s hold; until I’m a coda of sail song whipped in salted wind; until my chorus swells like a lynched tongue; until the nocturnes boiling beneath the roof of my mouth extinguish each burning cross. I sing this life in testimony to tempo rubato, to time stolen body by body by body by body from one passage to another; I sing tremolo to the opus of loss. I sing this story staccato and stretto, a fugue of blackface and blued-up arias. 
I sing with one hand smoldering in the steely canon, the other lento, slow, languorous: lingered in the fields of “Babylon’s Falling” ...

The tuba wakes before the man. It’s a content animal: having no word, for the moment, suits it fine. It looks at him with a dun and smooth interiority, as a glass of rum might, or a worn number on an apartment building: his hands, crossed on the chest, rise and fall with breathing. In the dream, he’s ringing the bell now; climbing, unlocking the door, peering into a glass. The flat is empty. Is the war over yet? Or was he here before the war? Soon, dropping salt levels will wake him— in tears, with an odd groove in his palm, as though he’d held on to an instrument for hours. For a good minute, he’ll be nameless, and when a name does come, it won’t be his: humming in thought the bright last name he rang on the doorbell, he’ll see, in a certain abrupt sunlight: he’d chosen her, then— to be able to call everything something.