154 Music poems

He’s brought me to hear his band. He sits in a corner mouthing his clarinet. A hellish racket begins. Outside, through flashes of lightning, wind gusts and rain whips, knocking the lights out every five minutes. In the dark, their faces give it their all, contorted, as they play a dance tune from memory. Full of energy, my poor friend anchors them all from behind. His clarinet writhes, breaks through the din, passes beyond it, releasing like a lone soul, into a dry, rough silence. The poor pieces of brass have been dented too often: the hands working the stops also work in the fields, and the obstinate brows stay fixed on the ground. Miserable worn-out blood, weakened by too many labors—you can hear it groan in their notes, as my friend struggles to lead them, his own hands hardened from swinging a hammer, from pushing a plane, from scraping a living. He’s lost all his old comrades, and he’s only thirty. Part of the postwar group that grew up on hunger. They all came to Turin, to look for a life, and discovered injustice. He learned, without smiling, how to work in a factory. He learned how to measure the hunger of others with his own fatigue— injustice was everywhere. He tried to find peace by walking, at night, down streets without ends, half-asleep, but found only thousands of streetlamps blazing down on iniquity: hoarse women and drunks, staggering puppets, far from their homes, He came, one winter, to Turin—factory lights, smoke and ash— and he learned what work is. He accepted that work was part of a man’s hard fate; if all men did that, there just might be some justice in this world. And he found new comrades. He suffered their long words, he listened and waited for them to be over. He made them his comrades. Families of them in each house, the city surrounded by them, the face of the world covered with them. And each of them felt desperate enough to conquer the world. They sound harsh tonight, despite all the time he spent coaching each player. He ignores the loud rain and the flickering lights. His face is severe, fixed on some grief, almost biting the mouthpiece. I’ve seen this expression before, one evening, just us and his brother, who’s ten years sadder than him. We were up late in the dim light, the brother studying a lathe he had built that didn’t work right, and my poor friend cursing the fate that kept him there, bound to his hammer and plane, feeding a pair of old people he never asked for. That’s when he yelled that it wasn’t fate that made the world suffer or made the daylight spark blasphemous outbursts: man is the guilty one.If we only could just leave, and be hungry and free, and say no to a life that uses our love and our piety, our families, our patches of dirt, to shackle our hands.

It seems to head from its last stop too fast, my transbay train’s strungout hoo , deep inside the tunnel, and starts to bleed into the baritone wail of that guy at platform’s end, a sort of lullaby rubbed against the wall then caught in a squall of wind darkening toward us, his whippy voice skinning its tired song off the tiled dome: he’s determined, the silky lyric says, to be independently blue , while we all wait to be chuted to car lot or home, closer to love, or farther, and sooner to loss, our bashful shoes and arms like lives crossed, every plural presence now some thing alone, thanks to our singer-man. We wait for the train, patient with hope, a hope that’s like complaint.

you know I wanted to know which one, the bridges are all made of metal out here, the diners are still chrome-plated-affairs, a silver lunch box you could almost pick up and carry on your way home but instead you fit yourself inside of its dents, bulky, heavy metal, you just went for the leather jacket, you know I flung myself through that metal that was so heavy, no not mental, but metal, I flew threw(ough) the Blue Sky Diner, right through Sunnyside's train yards, so high I saw both the trees and trains, the tops of the semitrucks that squish through skinny streets with not metal but bricks beneath the surface, you know it was all one and the same, unironic heavy metal, you know there is such a thing, I hate to have to say it this way, you know under the bridge near Skillman High School is the best place for a heavy metal concert next to the metal Queensboro Bridge, next to the Blue Sky Diner flying in the sky, adjacent to Sky Line Auto and landing for a beer with a splash at the Fire Water Inn - you know you're on fire, in the water, and the metal, hot, dunked into it, sizzles - yeah, I know you said the riffs sounded like metal, I know exactly which ones, which dented sides the notes screeched to and fro to, over and over, a riff engaged in a tiff of metal, the most perfect sound, perfect sound of all

No one knew the secret of my flutes, and I laugh now because some said I was enlightened. But the truth is I’m only a gardener who before the War was a dirt farmer and learned how to grow the bamboo in ditches next to the fields, how to leave things alone and let the silt build up until it was deep enough to stink bad as night soil, bad as the long, witch-grey hair of a ghost. No secret in that. My land was no good, rocky, and so dry I had to sneak water from the whites, hacksaw the locks off the chutes at night, and blame Mexicans, Filipinos, or else some wicked spirit of a migrant, murdered in his sleep by sheriffs and wanting revenge. Even though they never believed me, it didn’t matter—no witnesses, and my land was never thick with rice, only the bamboo growing lush as old melodies and whispering like brush strokes against the fine scroll of wind. I found some string in the shed or else took a few stalks and stripped off their skins, wove the fibers, the floss, into cords I could bind around the feet, ankles, and throats of only the best bamboos. I used an ice pick for an awl, a fish knife to carve finger holes, and a scythe to shape the mouthpiece. I had my flutes. * When the War came, I told myself I lost nothing. My land, which was barren, was not actually mine but leased (we could not own property) and the shacks didn’t matter. What did were the power lines nearby and that sabotage was suspected. What mattered to me were the flutes I burned in a small fire by the bath house. * All through Relocation, in the desert where they put us, at night when the stars talked and the sky came down and drummed against the mesas, I could hear my flutes wail like fists of wind whistling through the barracks. I came out of Camp, a blanket slung over my shoulder, found land next to this swamp, planted strawberries and beanplants, planted the dwarf pines and tended them, got rich enough to quit and leave things alone, let the ditches clog with silt again and the bamboo grow thick as history. * So, when it’s bad now, when I can’t remember what’s lost and all I have for the world to take means nothing, I go out back of the greenhouse at the far end of my land where the grasses go wild and the arroyos come up with cat’s-claw and giant dahlias, where the children of my neighbors consult with the wise heads of sunflowers, huge against the sky, where the rivers of weather and the charred ghosts of old melodies converge to flood my land and sustain the one thicket of memory that calls for me to come and sit among the tall canes and shape full-throated songs out of wind, out of bamboo, out of a voice that only whispers.

Overture More loudly to inveigh against your absence, Raising the volume by at least a third, Humbly I say I’ve written this immense Astonishing “Sonata” word by word, With leitmotivs you’ll wish you’d never heard, And a demented, shattering Cadenza. I’m pained to say that scholarship insists Cadenzas are conclusion to Concertos, Not Sonatas—true Sonatas close With what pedantic musicologists, Waving their Ph.D.s beneath my nose, Persist in calling Recapitulation. My double ending is a Variation: I couldn’t choose between them once I chose To write two endings, so, because I wrote a Recapitulation and Cadenza, My piece concludes two times—and then it ends Again because I’ve added on a Coda. To brush up on Sonata structure: first, The Exposition sounds two melodies, Deeply dissimilar, in different keys, Major and minor. Part Two is a burst Of brainstorms scholars call Development, In which the two themes of the Exposition Are changed and rearranged past recognition, Distorted, fragmented, dissolved, and blent Into chromatic superimposition, Till, imperceptibly, two themes unite. And then, if everything is going right, The piece concludes in Recapitulation. Exposition Theme One: My life lacks what, in lacking you? Theme Two: Does the material world exist? (Ideally your neurons should resist, As yet, connecting Numbers One and Two. But note the skill, the frightening mastery, The lunatic precision it entails To merge these separate themes, the way train rails Converge as they approach infinity.) Development I dreamed that an encyclopedia Opened before my eyes and there I found Analogies to sort of stack around My what-is-life-without-you-here idea: Like nous detached from Anaxagoras, Like cosmic fire glimmering without A Heraclitus there to find it out, Like square roots waiting for Pythagoras, Like One-ness riven from Parmenides, Like Nothing without Gorgias to detect it, Like paradox sans Zeno to perfect it, Like plural worlds lacking Empedocles, Like Plato’s chairs and tables if you took The furniture’s Eternal Forms away, Objects abandoned by Reality Still look the same, but look the way things look When I behold my life without you in it: A screwy room where chairs and tables lack Dimension from the front, the side, the back, Like finity without the infinite, Where tea parties are held without the Hatter, It’s like a single point withdrawn from Space, It’s like a physicist who cannot trace The ultimate constituents of matter— There is no evidence Matter exists. Thus do I introduce Theme Number Two. And I can’t prove it, but I know it’s true: The physical eludes the physicists. They’ve chased down matter past atomic rings Into small shadows, and they’ve lost it there. It seems that they can’t find it anywhere. They stalk imaginary floating things Like amateurish lepidopterists Round babbling brooks and mossy fairy knolls. Their net strings map out squares of empty holes. Behold them snatching something in their fists: Their fingers uncurl, cautious, on the sight Of Nothing crushed against the sweaty hand. But then I’m prejudiced, you understand. Not everyone on earth believes I’m right. But lest you think I’m kidding, or perverse, I went to hear a Lecture just last year About some things which I hold very dear: The smallest pieces of the universe. The Lecturer referred to them as Quarks. He seemed impervious to the mystery Surrounding their invisibility. I asked, when he concluded his remarks, “But are Quarks physical?” You’d think that he Were someone nearly martyred and I’d said Our duty’s to die peacefully in bed. He took his glasses off and blinked at me. Were I John Milton, I would now destroy This moment of high drama and deploy A thirty-line Homeric simile. But I’m not Milton, nor was meant to be. He put his glasses on, and said, “Of course.” Now, I may be the south end of a horse, But logically and analogically, And physically, and metaphysically, And, if it gets to that, religiously, And absolutely scientifically, I don’t believe that Quarks can pass the test Of Being There, and since they’re fundamental, Why, then, the world’s a dream, and dreams are mental, And since in mental matters East or West I need you for this dream’s interpretation— Stop looking at your watch, for I’ve divined, With these two themes uncomfortably combined, It’s time now for the Recapitulation. Recapitulation Frankly, I’m disinclined to reassert The themes my Exposition indicated. Stuffed shirts there are, and hordes of overrated Experts who would slay or badly hurt With airy wave of hand my insights; no, I will not play to them, I’ll not rehash My song though they with hard and cold cash Should bribe me, or should tell me where to go. My complex principles are explicated Under “Development.” So let them laugh: I’ll not permit this section to be half So convoluted as anticipated. Cadenza Sing, Heav’nly Muse, and give me lyric flight, Give me special effects, give me defiance To challenge the Academy of Science On fundamental points, and get them right; Give me the strength to can the Latinisms, To forge analogies between the thing Nature abhors and my apartment; sing To vanquish literary criticisms If possible and literary sharks. And even if you feel submicroscopic Elements exceed me as a topic, Please try to back me up regarding Quarks, Thereby to advocate my metaphor (Absence the vehicle, physics the tenor) So that the Universal Void coincides With showing—I daresay, with showing off— The consequences of his going off; By showing everything, in fact, but slides. Coda Me heart detests, reviles, denounces, loathes Your absence with a passion like a furnace. The shirt of love, said Eliot, will burn us; And normally I’d add, “Love’s other clothes Burn just as badly”—but, because I’ve bent A rule or two, I won’t extend this figure; Good taste prevents this piece from getting bigger; Please see above for everything I meant.

Some claim the origin of song was a war cry some say it was a rhyme telling the farmers when to plant and reap don’t they know the first song was a lullaby pulled from a mother’s sleep said the old woman A significant factor generating my delight in being alive this springtime is the birdsong that like a sweeping mesh has captured me like diamond rain I can’t hear it enough said the tulip lifetime after lifetime we surged up the hill I and my dear brothers thirsty for blood uttering our beautiful songs said the dog

For Audrey Richardson Curdy (1931–1986) It was 1986 , when currencies to be changed Into multiple-launch-surface, anti-tank missiles Swarmed through numbered bank accounts Like Ovid’s seething knotted seed of frog-slime, Which not seldome attracted by the sun falls In little frogs with the rain; when it also rained Radionuclides, strontium, caesium,

Stanza 1 From harmony, from Heav'nly harmony This universal frame began. When Nature underneath a heap Of jarring atoms lay, And could not heave her head, The tuneful voice was heard from high, Arise ye more than dead. Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry, In order to their stations leap, And music's pow'r obey. From harmony, from Heav'nly harmony This universal frame began: From harmony to harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in man. Stanza 2 What passion cannot music raise and quell! When Jubal struck the corded shell, His list'ning brethren stood around And wond'ring, on their faces fell To worship that celestial sound: Less than a god they thought there could not dwell Within the hollow of that shell That spoke so sweetly and so well. What passion cannot music raise and quell! Stanza 3 The trumpet's loud clangor Excites us to arms With shrill notes of anger And mortal alarms. The double double double beat Of the thund'ring drum Cries, hark the foes come; Charge, charge, 'tis too late to retreat. Stanza 4 The soft complaining flute In dying notes discovers The woes of hopeless lovers, Whose dirge is whisper'd by the warbling lute. Stanza 5 Sharp violins proclaim Their jealous pangs, and desperation, Fury, frantic indignation, Depth of pains and height of passion, For the fair, disdainful dame. Stanza 6 But oh! what art can teach What human voice can reach The sacred organ's praise? Notes inspiring holy love, Notes that wing their Heav'nly ways To mend the choirs above. Stanza 7 Orpheus could lead the savage race; And trees unrooted left their place; Sequacious of the lyre: But bright Cecilia rais'd the wonder high'r; When to her organ, vocal breath was giv'n, An angel heard, and straight appear'd Mistaking earth for Heav'n. GRAND CHORUS As from the pow'r of sacred lays The spheres began to move, And sung the great Creator's praise To all the bless'd above; So when the last and dreadful hour This crumbling pageant shall devour, The trumpet shall be heard on high, The dead shall live, the living die, And music shall untune the sky.

When tunes jigged nimbler than the blood And quick and high the bows would prance And every fiddle string would burst To catch what’s lost beyond the string, While half afraid their children stood, I saw the old come out to dance. The heart is not so light at first, But heavy like a bough in spring.

1894 You couldn’t pack a Broadwood half a mile— You mustn’t leave a fiddle in the damp— You couldn’t raft an organ up the Nile, And play it in an Equatorial swamp. I travel with the cooking-pots and pails— I’m sandwiched ’tween the coffee and the pork— And when the dusty column checks and tails, You should hear me spur the rearguard to a walk! With my ‘Pilly-willy-winky-winky-popp!’ [Oh, it’s any tune that comes into my head!] So I keep ’em moving forward till they drop; So I play ’em up to water and to bed. In the silence of the camp before the fight, When it’s good to make your will and say your prayer, You can hear my strumpty-tumpty overnight, Explaining ten to one was always fair. I’m the Prophet of the Utterly Absurd, Of the Patently Impossible and Vain— And when the Thing that Couldn’t has occurred, Give me time to change my leg and go again. With my ‘Tumpa-tumpa-tumpa-tumpa-tump!’ In the desert where the dung-fed camp-smoke curled. There was never voice before us till I led our lonely chorus, I—the war-drum of the White Man round the world! By the bitter road the Younger Son must tread, Ere he win to hearth and saddle of his own,— ’Mid the riot of the shearers at the shed, In the silence of the herder’s hut alone— In the twilight, on a bucket upside down, Hear me babble what the weakest won’t confess— I am Memory and Torment—I am Town! I am all that ever went with evening dress! With my ‘Tunka-tunka-tunka-tunka-tunk!’ [So the lights—the London Lights—grow near and plain!] So I rowel ’em afresh towards the Devil and the Flesh Till I bring my broken rankers home again. In desire of many marvels over sea, Where the new-raised tropic city sweats and roars, I have sailed with Young Ulysses from the quay Till the anchor rumbled down on stranger shores. He is blooded to the open and the sky, He is taken in a snare that shall not fail, He shall hear me singing strongly, till he die, Like the shouting of a backstay in a gale. With my ‘Hya! Heeya! Heeya! Hullah! Haul!’ [Oh, the green that thunders aft along the deck!] Are you sick o’ towns and men? You must sign and sail again, For it’s ‘Johnny Bowlegs, pack your kit and trek!’ Through the gorge that gives the stars at noon-day clear— Up the pass that packs the scud beneath our wheel— Round the bluff that sinks her thousand fathom sheer— Down the valley with our guttering brakes asqueal: Where the trestle groans and quivers in the snow, Where the many-shedded levels loop and twine, Hear me lead my reckless children from below Till we sing the Song of Roland to the pine! With my ‘Tinka-tinka-tinka-tinka-tink!’ [Oh, the axe has cleared the mountain, croup and crest!] And we ride the iron stallions down to drink, Through the cañons to the waters of the West! And the tunes that mean so much to you alone— Common tunes that make you choke and blow your nose— Vulgar tunes that bring the laugh that brings the groan— I can rip your very heartstrings out with those; With the feasting, and the folly, and the fun— And the lying, and the lusting, and the drink, And the merry play that drops you, when you’re done. To the thoughts that burn like irons if you think. With my ‘Plunka-lunka-lunka-lunka-lunk!’ Here’s a trifle on account of pleasure past, Ere the wit that made you win gives you eyes to see your sin And—the heavier repentance at the last! Let the organ moan her sorrow to the roof— I have told the naked stars the Grief of Man! Let the trumpet snare the foeman to the proof— I have known Defeat, and mocked it as we ran! My bray ye may not alter nor mistake When I stand to jeer the fatted Soul of Things, But the Song of Lost Endeavour that I make, Is it hidden in the twanging of the strings? With my ‘Ta-ra-rara-rara-ra-ra-rrrp!’ [Is it naught to you that hear and pass me by?] But the word—the word is mine, when the order moves the line And the lean, locked ranks go roaring down to die! The grandam of my grandam was the Lyre— [Oh, the blue below the little fisher-huts!] That the Stealer stooping beachward filled with fire, Till she bore my iron head and ringing guts! By the wisdom of the centuries I speak— To the tune of yestermorn I set the truth— I, the joy of life unquestioned—I, the Greek— I, the everlasting Wonder-song of Youth! With my ‘Tinka-tinka-tinka-tinka-tink!’ [What d’ye lack, my noble masters! What d’ye lack?] So I draw the world together link by link: Yea, from Delos up to Limerick and back!