rel="nofollow" href="#uad867c3e-fffa-59d8-b090-14171f5d4603">Update for Francis Joseph
Report of the Monuments Commission
Soldiers Three in the Big Easy
Devils & Islands
Fantasia on Dummy Keys
The harpsichord sounds like two skeletons copulating.
—Sir Thomas Beecham
The practice keyboard teaches only fingering.
Interpretation is beyond it. Lacking sound,
It will forgive wrong notes, not know an exercise
From Bach, if there indeed is some distinction. Mute,
It is the ideal medium for twelve-tone works,
If not the Chopin repertoire. Without response,
How judge of touch? Too firm? Too light? One must assume
Seducers learn and necrophiliacs do not,
Else why do spinet’s key and quill go at it so?
Is Czerny a perversion? And if harpsichords
Seem musical cadavers, are the fringe who play
“Authentic instruments” grave robbers? They, in proof
Of scholarship as folly, preach that out-of-tune
Is what is called for. Vocal exercises—scales—
Employ an instrument whose authenticity
No one can doubt. A vocalise may have no words,
But is expression in a way dexterity,
Viewed, cannot ever be, although Franz Liszt might say
“My fingering could surely semaphore the deaf,
Who at recitals should be charged full ticket price.”
To speak of heartstrings being plucked is retrograde,
As to both time and mechanism. Live hearts hammer.
Before Clocks Were Digital
Tonguing the brushes as they line a phosphorescent paint
Upon the dials that are piecework of their day,
The girls who presently will harbor cancer in the jaw
And die of it in more than one sense Time destroys.
In most of us a radium does not accumulate.
The numerals, however, do. They sum to what,
Subtracted by its twin the midnight hour, is nought indeed:
Zero of a departed beat, a darkened face.
As radium decays it goes to half-life, interim
Which we are not permitted. Half-life is for us
The half we call a coma. Greenish numerals that light
Insomnia, the hands that track it, are, dispersed
In time, the ghosts of those who painted them, or at the least
Their fit memorials—of application, tongue,
And talent, faint but glowing, form: the minute’s trace prolonged
Beyond the minute, time-specific and yet more.
After the Fall
Created out of five-and-dimes,
The Woolworth sums up better times:
A Flemish Gothic 1910
Metropolis that might have been;
As, wholly 1932,
The Empire State, forever new,
Foretells a city so far seen
In drawings only, caught between
Prospectus and a backward glance
Toward Babylon. As we advance
The future takes on, more and more,
A look of follies gone before.
On every planner’s mounting zeal
Hell’s Kitchen comes to put its seal,
And where the streets of Haussmann go
Stood once the Walls of Jericho.
Above the airship mooring mast
The TV aerials broadcast,
Confirming that Count Zeppelin
Is where our Captain Kirks begin.
In fiction—pulp or subtler art—
In film, the silents at the start
And talkies after, Emerald
Or seven-gated, tightly walled
Yet welcoming, a citadel
No actuality can quell,
Our future is that city, myth
We are from childhood encumbered with.
