“I’m sick of music, especially my own!”
The relatives of Berlioz were horrified.
Haydn’s wife used music to line pastry pans.
On rainy nights the ghost of Mendelssohn
brought melodies for Schumann to compose.
“Such harmony is in immortal souls….
We cannot hear it.” One could suppose
Herr Bruckner would have smiled. At Tegernsee
the peasants stood to hear young Paganini play,
but here there’s lightning, and the thunder rolls.
The radio goes off and on. The rain
falls to the pavement like applause.
A scrap of paper tumbles down the street.
On rainy evenings Schumann would look out
and scribble on the windows of his cell.
“Such harmony.” Cars splash out in the rain.
The relatives of Berlioz were horrified
to see the horses break from the cortege
and gallop with his casket to the grave.
Liszt wept to hear old Paganini play.
Haydn’s wife used music to line pastry pans.
GOD ONLY KNOWS
Here is the church,
Here is the steeple,
Open it up,
And see all the people.
God only knows
if Bach’s greatest work
was just an improvised
accompaniment
between two verses of a hymn,
one that stopped the burghers
squirming in their pews
and made them not only
listen to the organ in the loft
but actually hear the roof
unbend itself
and leave the church wide
open to a terrifying sky
which he had filled with angels
holding ledgers
for a roll call of the damned,
whom they would have named,
had not the congregation
started up the final chorus
and sung
to save their souls.
A CURSE ON GEOGRAPHERS
We want an earth to walk upon,
Not reasons to remain at home.
Shall we make journeys only to see
The same stars circling in the night?
Eat the same fish in foreign harbors?
Breathe the same air? Sail across
These oceans only to discover
Our own island’s other shore?
Let the oceans spill their green from off
The edges of the earth, and let
The curving plain unbend itself
Behind the mountains. Put wind back
Into the cheeks of demons. Voice,
Pronounce your reasonable desire
And sing the round earth flat again!
A SHORT HISTORY OF TOBACCO
Profitable, poisonous, and purely American—
it was Columbus who discovered it
on reaching China, noticing the leaves
in a canoe. He sent his men ashore
to find the Great Khan’s palace. They returned
to tell of squatting natives who drank smoke.
Rolfe smuggled seeds to cold, bankrupt Virginia.
When he returned years later, all the streets
were planted with the crop, the marketplace
and churchyards overgrown. Grim ministers
preached harvest from the pulpit and stood out
among the fields at night to guard their tithes.
More valuable than silver, worth ten times
the price of peppercorn. In Africa
six rolls could buy a man. The ships would reach
Virginia stocked with slaves or English wives
while every year the farms moved farther west
abandoning their dry, exhausted fields.
Tenacious, fertile, rank as any weed,
Linnaeus counted forty thousand seeds
inside one pod. Miraculus, he wrote,
the cure for toothache, shingles, running sores
or, pushed by bellows through a patient’s lung,
the panacea of the alchemists.
Fragrant, prophylactic, and medicinal,
Pepys chewed it during the Great Plague.
It cost a fortune, but it saved his life.
Later he spent an afternoon to watch
a surgeon fill a cat with just one drop
of the quintessence of Virginia leaf.
… But when a bear was killed, tobacco smoke
was blown into his throat to soothe the spirit.
The elders smoked and chanted in a trance.
The Mayans blew the smoke to the four corners
of the world. It was a gift from God—
profitable, poisonous, and purely American.
GUIDE TO THE OTHER GALLERY
This is the hall of broken limbs
Where splintered marble athletes lie
Beside the arms of cherubim.
Nothing is ever thrown away.
These butterflies are set in rows.
So small and gray inside their case
They look alike now. I suppose
Death makes most creatures commonplace.
These portraits here of the unknown
Are hung three high, frame piled on frame.
Each potent soul who craved renown,
Immortalized without a name.
Here are the shelves of unread books,
Millions of pages turning brown.
Visitors wander through the stacks,
But no one ever takes one down.
I wish I were a better guide.
There’s so much more that you should see—
Rows of bottles with nothing inside,
Displays of locks which have no key.
You’d like to go? I wish you could.
This room has such a peaceful view.
Look at that case of antique wood
Without a label. It’s for you.
MY CONFESSIONAL SESTINA
Let me confess. I’m sick of these sestinas
written by youngsters in poetry workshops
for the delectation of their fellow students,
and then published in little magazines
that no one reads, not even the contributors
who at least in this omission show some taste.
Is this merely a matter of personal taste?
I don’t think so. Most sestinas
are such dull affairs. Just ask the contributors
the last time they finished one outside of a workshop,
even the poignant one on herpes in that new little magazine
edited by their most brilliant fellow student.
Let’s be honest. It has become a form for students,
an exercise to build technique rather than taste
and the official entry blank into the little magazines—
because despite its reputation, a passable sestina
isn’t very hard to write, even for kids in workshops
who care less about being poets than contributors.
Granted nowadays everyone is a contributor.
My barber is currently a student
in a rigorous correspondence school workshop.
At lesson six he can already taste
success having just placed his own sestina
in a national tonsorial magazine.
Who really cares about most little magazines?
Eventually not even their own contributors
who having published a few preliminary sestinas
send their work East to prove they’re no longer students.
They need to be recognized as the new arbiters of taste
so they can teach their own graduate workshops.
Where will it end? This grim cycle of workshops
churning out poems for little magazines