Words scattered over audience
restless in their seats—
some catch, some stick,
some float past the ushers
out into the freedom.
We are trapped in hearing.
Each of us misses a word
now and then, not the same word,
probably most of them get missed
until all that talk
there is nothing said
and silence is allowed to begin—
music, that is, the closest
we can ever get to real silence.
17 February 2019
for Charlotte
Let it be lapis
the shape I give
shorn from the sky
and on the middle finger
worn, to set the matter
straight, the world
upright, firm, revolves
around our promises,
the sky the sky
17 February 2019
Can’t help it. Just hear different from you.
I’m always listening for the heart and the god,
the lust for splendor and the splendor of lust.
Even when you tell me that’s just dull passagework
while, say, Schubert is fumbling for his next idea,
I hear the thighs and belly of the stumbling man,
a boy really, half-drunk, shouldering towards
the ever-elusive Friend, the one he wants to worship
and go to God with and touch. The Friend is
always hidden in the music, ahead of where
I ever am. That’s why I guess I’m bored
by music that knows what it’s doing,
where it’s going. Professional, tafelmusik,
the academy of inoffensive technique, skeletons
dressed up in costumes from the opera house,
the one that always burned down yesterday.
The last Freemason died today
carried with him
into the Familiar Strangeness of afterlife
the secrets of unsatisfiable yearning
pothos, from which
his architecture grew.
From absence alone
he made deep song.
A bridge to nowhere!
Stagerite, explain myself
in thy book I looked in vain
and so they closed my eyes on me
now I must write
what I would read
and all the stories start again
and never end.
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