Sunday, April 12, 2009

Day 10 but poem written on Day 11

this is, i suppose, day 10 but really day 11 but poets don't care about chronological time 
anyway.  but i'm not a poet so i suppose i have no excuse.  




the elegy continues -- sort of, I guess,  Faust the fucker is everywhere. 





Anton Webern probably because of my
murdered Austrian Grandfather

"Doomed to a total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference
he inexorably kept cutting out his dazzling diamonds, the mines 
of which he had such a perfect knowledge."  

Stravinsky



It happens like this
-- what do I know about the twelve tone technique?
I quit piano
at 13.  
Long before my teacher
allowed me the honor of Schoenberg. 

Goethe's Faust
I put it down -- remember?  We went 
to find Robinson and that piano;
those red socks and the cat called Lonesome,
curled and sleeping through the endless ringing phone.

A small beat up book of immortal poems
Hart Crane, page 267 
"For the marriage of Helen and Faustus" 

and this isn't meant to be didactic 

put it down.

"A Little History of Modern Music" 
by William H. Gass -- last in the book
bought for 25 cents at the Hospital Thrift 
Shop on a steel rain Holy Saturday.  
I thought 

about the women who guarded
Christ's tomb, about Jesus' decent to Hell
and Gilgamesh.  I tried for something 

else -- Cochise, Arizona, a ghost town 
Doc Holliday and Big Nose Kate 
hot desert, prostitutes 
killing a copperhead in a far off canyon--

but even notes are not random 
-- each one like a star thrown from a fist
to form a constellation

then 
you clear your throat very close to my ear. 


1 comment:

cafe selavy said...

Double negative--"I am not a poet so I have no excuse."

Translated--I'm a poet so I have an excuse.

Excuse me.