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His Apologia Pro Ratiocination This "speech" we speak of-what can it be if not translations, incoherencies, ideograms, pebbles, shreds of silk. it is a nest we build to entice others, to make them want to hang around or else it might be to "communicate" a crust of information such as, "To get to Grand Central Station take the crosstown bus." Perhaps we need to beat our kettle-drums as counterpoint to chambered compositions, lacking the brook-babble, buffalo-stomp heard in earlier times, or moo of cows. (Who can remember the redundancy of cows?) some think it might be one of those windy songs connecting us to others of our school or swarm. Of course it must be something innate, something we really wish to do-although how weighted and harsh with age my chords, my hands often tremble, my famished face grows mwarm. My instrument-it is not mine-and the words, those tenuous twitches, gaffes, and glottal stops do not fairly represent me-are not what I mean to say. What a vast abyss can separate flautist from cadenza played, huffing maker from the vial made, the lover and the kiss. |
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Wires Glad rapper, forelocks frenetically skewed, what outlet hast thou stuck you digit into makes you so exuberant, so needy, filled with rapture and terror, your cheekbones lit with sweat and fire, and your future delivery already departed. Music lingers, brief riff rising to darkness, your blue day- while the century ends faster immediately and the songs, from hidie-hi to jive to rap. one night, before you knew how to walk, your father and mother danced, swaying as if they were first and generic, big band hits: "Tangerine," "Anapola," "Harbor Lights." Where are they now, those ancient 33's or 78's- thick platters clunking on the turntable and, years earlier, that liquifiable winding-down. Lazy, men, nearly all of them, inventing gadgets to save themselves two steeps ages before they thought of any contraption simple as a clothes-washer, and even those, from the old regime, squawked swore and shook themselves across the floor making their own jazz for an entourage of women after the war- who didn't need to send out diapers anymore. The world has not yet shaken free from its imaginary axis although we all know it may someday do so- in the interim of us are mall- hopping, buying the latest c.d. and wondering how we can share the timpani, fluorescence, confetti, the joyous hee-haw and howl, the pure canticle of the spheres and its everlasting continuance on that eroding shore where what will never come is always leaving. |
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Swamp What if, like a certain smiling Public man, I went back (but I can!) to that diminished edifice once bigger than a palace with doors too heavy to open, not one door leading to the next- rather each one supplying the art of the meticulous- like a paint-by-number gouache. That's what they tried to teach us- those harried evangelists- fabrics pinked inside and out, hems hand-sewn to silk bindings and stitches next to microscopic-finger- nails checked each morning-was it all pointless?? That ravenous pride- excellence! Excellence! they cried-we cried such horizons too far beyond imagination-sometimes even small boys cried- so distanced from order they thought perfection must be heaven. And the music instructor- widowed by war-wounded biweekly by our slovenly scales. We loved her will, her still face, still we couldn't convert those giddy, passionate molecules hopping in our veins to solemnity, a process like alchemy; we were slow leaning whatever we needed to know. "Morning is dawning and Peer Gynt is yawning and Grieg is fast asleep in his bed," or "T-R-A-U-M-E-R-E-I, Traumerei, by Schuu-uu by Schuu-uu-man." Would our current habitat seem shoddy to them- those tidy disciplinarians- gone now- a world where vulgarity hovers, spreading psittacocis, obliterating light, even seams and dreams of a chair planted firmly, or perhaps a principality in felicity's long corridor. No it is better to stay here, no frequent-flier fare bought or alluded to, hoping to discover, in the blue landfill where we eke out disorder, something of small value. |
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