From a Bus Window in Central Ohio, Just Before a Thunder Shower
. . . and Mr. Spitzer, though very mournful, should not consider that his great works were truly lost because no one had ever combed the sea of all its music, these great combers rolling, all its reflected stars and starfish riding at high tide, or delved unconsciousness, fishing for that great pearl—for no great musical composition, not even his great music as yet unplayed, had ever been so explicitly written wave after surging wave that, with all its audible and inaudible sounds and sonorous tonal poems touching the feathery clouds and quivering throat cords and tongues of golden bells burning like fire and chromatic colors pale as the colors of the sentinel dolphin dying on the moth-colored rocks and black notes like blackbirds flying overhead to escort him through seas of glassy clouds and great silver bells and trumpets spilling showers of sound and dead keys like his bones, dead bones singing, and waves surging over the empty boat, it could be played as written . . . for none should sound these depths, and it was the music of beginning, and it was the music of ending never ending
THE KINGFISHER
In a year the nightingales were said to be so loud
they drowned out slumber, and peafowl strolled screaming
beside the ruined nunnery, through the long evening
of a dazzled pub crawl, the halcyon color, portholed
by those eye- spots’ stunning tapestry, unsettled
the pastoral nightfall with amazements opening.
Months later, intermission in a pub on Fifty- fifth Street
found one of them still breathless, the other quizzical,
acting the philistine, puncturing Stravinsky—“Tell
me, what was that racket in the orchestra about?”—
hauling down the Firebird, harum-scarum, like a kite,
a burnished, breathing wreck that didn’t hurt at all.
Among the Bronx Zoo’s exiled jungle fowl, they heard
through headphones of a separating panic, the bellbird
reiterate its single chong, a scream nobody answered.
When he mourned, “The poetry is gone,” she quailed,
seeing how his hands shook, sobered into feeling old.
By midnight, yet another fifth would have been killed.
A Sunday morning, the November of their cataclysm
(Dylan Thomas brought in in extremis to St. Vincent’s,
that same week, a symptomatic datum) found them
wandering a downtown churchyard. Among its headstones,
while from unruined choirs the noise of Christendom
poured over Wall Street, a benison in vestments,
a late thrush paused, in transit from some grizzled
spruce bog to the humid equatorial fireside: berryeyed,
bark-brown above, with dark hints of trauma
in the stigmata of its underparts—or so, too bruised
just then to have invented anything so fancy,
later, re- embroidering a retrospect, she had supposed.
In gray England, years of muted recrimination (then
dead silence) later, she could not have said how many
spoiled takeoffs, how many entanglements gone sodden,
how many gaudy evenings made frantic by just one
insomniac nightingale, how many liaisons gone down
screaming in a stroll beside the ruined nunnery;
a kingfisher’s burnished plunge, the color
of felicity afire, came glancing like an arrow
through landscapes of untended memory: ardor
illuminating with its terrifying currency
now no mere glimpse, no porthole vista
but, down on down, the uninhabitable sorrow.
