Gadget
An instrument so sensitive
it can pick up thoughts
around artifacts, and in the penumbra
of a site, far out into the desert.
But from people, never,
or other living things,
however rich with dead
the soil they eat.
It's a kick to wear the earphones
and sample relics
of love and hunger on an evening breeze.
Someone at my last dig
said, rather wistfully,
it confirmed and destroyed poetry.
Which is why we're distressed when
it doesn't work (if that's what's happening).
This shard, bead,
vegetable matter from
five evil-smelling clay
and sandstone meters down
should be talking about gods,
or the harvests and babies gods
are for. Not
some melancholy inaudible obsession,
some cruel wish to sleep.
Pamina
*Pamina lebet noch*
- The Magic Flute
Cosmology, like other aspects
of culture, seems to be entering
a mannerist phase.
Other universes
forever unreachable (unless
their light slowly rounds
a tight, distant bend
to appear as ours) - yet,
as the impossible crow flies,
only millimeters away …
The idea seems to justify
someone I knew
who sat by a wall,
whispering to it. One couldn't tell
if there was hope
for response, or belief
in a presence
behind it, or merely
a place briefly safe
from the vehement dash and élan
of some enemy.
Meanwhile, in a time of
mergers, failures, increased costs
and the universal triumph
of pop, the few surviving
independent classical
labels have come around to
my taste
for the out-of-the-way, the unfairly
neglected.
So high is the volume, one
feels it will, of itself, create
a world where things
go right: where Tiessen
regains popularity and energy
after the *Hitlerzeit; where Duparc,
instead of attending mass
for fifty years, manages
to transcribe the angelic theme; where
Rott, after a month
in the asylum, decides
he is not being pursued and poisoned
by the Brahmsians.
And today, up the street, near
the big new houses, on
those telephone poles
that perennially bear
sad xeroxed shots
of cats, another
picture, words other than
"Reward" - Pamina
has been found! Pamina, aged
three, has been returned
to Emily, age six,
who in the photo hugs
the cat tightly to her and
whose face displays
that emotion one
should never have to, or should always, feel.
