Libretto
One was dicing an onion,
the other uncorking a bottle of wine.
We agreed – the chanting dishwasher
was attuned to the steaming kettle.
*
My mother’s favorite song
was “But Beautiful,” a hit for Sinatra
in 1948, the year she married my father.
The wedding guests discovered
some kids bent the antennas on their cars.
Static shredded the music
on their ways home.
Sixty-seven years later, she heard singing
at 2am — that couple downstairs, every night
the same song, but at least it’s the one I love.
And the sky was filled with shining blimps!
*
Since they can avert their eyes
but not their ears, they are gratified
or devastated at will by the tune and lyrics.
Dissonant or dulcet, no escape.
This is why they went to Oslo
to stand before The Scream.
*
We invited L to dinner, she replied
I’d love to – but the ride home
would be so long.
Still, she came. As I drove her back
to Cambridge, she asked for the classical station.
Tutto è follia nel mondo
Ciò che non è piacer –
Everything is folly in this world
that does not give us pleasure.
I was startled by her singing.
And turn down the a/c.
*
What the song asks from stillness
is a promise for a song in return.
The car stopping alongside at the red light
replies with a ballad of ardor and anger.
*
Night clubs, a little something playing in the background —
that’s good for men and women who are strangers to each other.
But it’s hard on a creative person. I prefer to play for people
more familiar with each other and ready to listen.
Like married people. You follow? So said Ornette Coleman.
*
My grandfather, working in a hotel in Havana,
was told to deliver a phonograph to a room.
The guest in the room was Al Capone.
They listened to La Forza del Destino
and sang together from Act 1.
Commanded by my grandmother
to perform some chore, he would belt out
Vendetta! and wink at me.
*
Human history is a yellow 78-rpm record.
No, a stack of them, given away to cousins
as the boy grows into his 45’s – bye bye love,
all shook up, that’ll be the day, chances are.
Alone with the songs, the door shut.
An ambulance rushes by, towards the hospital.
Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on. The mother calls
dinner! Even after the music ends
the record keeps spinning.
*
Someone asked Sibelius, what’s the meaning
of your fourth symphony? He replied,
play the record again.
*
The gap between the inarticulate and whatever
is finally uttered is filled by song.
Between words that can’t be said, on which it is impossible
to be silent.
Music means I don’t have to speak,
I can just live.
This better be good, these seats aren’t cheap
says the voice behind us.
The sounds of their bodies shifting
to settle in, then our breathing in harness
with the song, the part of me that was there
before I was.
The phrase “the part of me that was there before I was” is taken from Sidney Bechet’s Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography
Tell Her You Saw Me
Whenever she moved she left
a space to fall back into.
She winked and turned a corner
with a whiff of coffee and rose.
Chemicals passed between us.
With the reflexes of a fly
she swerved before the fluids
in our eyes could flow and merge.
Along the bright corridors
of office space, on the ramp
leading down to the lobby,
she drifted, her comprehension
softly humming em em em
all the way down. One morning
she gave me a plum, I saved
the stone for several years.
She would drop things, or appear
with a bandaged wrist, or depart
early for an undisclosed reason.
If you see her, on the street,
heading down to the subway
or at the open market
touching fresh produce — before
she swirls away with watercress,
tell her you saw me today,
tell her I‘m the only one left
who pronounces her name aloud.
I can’t forget — our arms brushed
liminally. Her skin was pre-pre-cancerous.
Her forehead was a private screen
for a movie aficionado.
The credits rolled.
The empty reel spun risibly.
Queue
Five of us wait in the cold
for someone to unlock the door of the phone store.
A cluster of us, not a line — when the door opens,
who will rush first to pass?
Maybe the man in the flannel baseball hat
arrived here first. If so, his privilege has lapsed.
Seventeen degrees. A woman digs her hands deeper
into the pockets of her of her parka.
At three minutes to nine,
with shuffle-steps and quarter-turns —
a queue forms, a finding of oneself
bordered by two others for whom I also act
as the other on one side of the boundary.
All the lights come on at once,
illuminating the signage and goods.
We can see but not hear the jangling of keys
as she on the inside approaches.
At that moment, a motive abandons me.
Just as she inserts the key in the lock,
I exhale the urge for upgrade into a cloud of mist,
a frigid sufficiency overtakes me, I step aside
and everyone files into the warmth, and each one in passing
shutters a consulate in my shivering body.
A Walk Down the Street
The nation is suddenly
fissured, cracking surfaces
and sinkholes in parking lots,
the price of asphalt rising,
town crews working overtime.
But the hills and woodland streams
remain, unmoved by what’s claimed
in op-eds. My neighbor climbed
up on his roof and installed
a lightning rod. The nation
can’t digest the dejection
of its people, animals
emerge from the woods and eat
some of the grief, fungi try
to help, but the birds are too
distressed, their plumage seems dull.
A video of someone
with convincing urgency
showed how to build a bonfire
and grieve on the shattered ground.
Something seeping up, puddling.
Months of bonfires, smoke induced
to efface other fumes.
A message from you would be
worth a thousand cords of wood.
My hair went white these last months.
Unforeseen winds blew my hat
into a crevice on Main
Street. My hair went wild with strange
thoughts. I tried in vain to pin
them to the haze between us.
after Du Fu, “Spring View,” as translated by Arthur Sze
