Devils & Islands. Turner Cassity
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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.
Outside Manaus, not to disappoint the tours,
A number of the locals have obligingly
Gone native, hunter-gatherers in those locales
Not being numerous before the rubber boom
Annihilated all of them. The derelicts
In urban jungles stateside lack so safe a choice.
Feathers and piercings, body paint on them would seem
Survivals of the ’60s, and increase dislike
That they incur, already great. Earrings are threats?
A naked savage is a homeless person, nude?
Curare is a savage’s designer drug,
His head shop all too unequivocally that,
And any medicine of his, Alternative.
Headhunter, herbalist, ex-hippie growing old,
Have you as tourist trap, asylum, dead-end street
A jungle placable as this? All of your past
Tamed? Going native in its time was not PC.
It was admitting failure, just as, now, it’s seen
As saving wildlife with a nose flute. Music puts
Also its spin on histories of peonage
In rubber gathering, an expiation based
On the offending firms’ elitist theory
Goodyear will always be what makes the world go round,
And no town with an opera house can be all bad.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
1897–1957
The perfect hero, perfect plot,
I did not live to score.
That would have meant, as like as not,
Techniques I used before,
But barer. Fewer upward sweeps
Among the strings; no harps;
Fanfares, but diatonic; leaps
Of key from flats to sharps
Avoided, save where, as with change
Of focus, they explain.
You cannot treat the Texas Range
And soundstage Spanish Main
In one tonality. But who
For hero, what the script?