Friday, March 13, 2020

The Saxophone For Sandalphon

I.
It's inaccessible, an inch away,
Orpheus and his Lyra from on high
Buzzing with advice, just like every
Departed spirit. To hear the cold sky

Takes an awful lot of silence, to cope
When knowledge is too painful, and the day,
A machine, pulls inevitable ropes,
What you want still a semiquaver away.

But the mystery, even when it comes,
Is an orphan, invisible and dumb,
Like any new leaf fallen from the sky,

It needs, to even sing, receptive ears,
In those who'd live without cathartic tears,
Yet it receives ... a few keys, to get by.

II.
Each unexpected gasp, familiar roar
As it comes, comprehensible as wind,
Is received whole, pure, as known from before.
The suffering's sent to the other end,

The flame automatically breaks the air,
A disembodied voice speaks to who you are,
A ghost reminds you are alive and bare
From somewhere else, as remote as the stars,

Until you're surrounded by what's not you,
Chasing what's not real as if it's what's true
As the music froths to its aching top

And the material world disappears
To a higher ideal, more solid and clear.
There's just longing and the void when it stops.

III.
How can you know where it went, when you won't
Know where it came from? The note is alone,
Threaded to others by forces you don't
Want to understand, in your close to home,

Where materials demand to be shaped
And transformed, in a blind urge to modify,
From discomfort, at how what is can't escape,
So the sun-lit world's for the hand, to deny.

You work like a monk to capture its word.
It never says what purposes are served,
Even as we puppets bob on our sticks.

It is not for the monk to ask for more:
What God is, what He wants, what this is for;
No use asking a dancer, "what is music?"

IV.
It's still there, even when it's not there,
Ghost spring in the stride, working whistle tone,
Makes the hammer on the actual flare
Something more than what is circling the stone,

A vapor layer of longing, concrete
As the glistening water sprayed on lawns.
You can hear, wafting past the homes like meat
The notes of someone conjuring the dawn.

She is shut off from this world, in darkness
Waiting for sounds to tumble out of strangeness,
A thousand private vagaries turned loud

To offend the neighborhood, for it is wrong,
But only because what's right is known
As soon as it breaks like the sun through cloud.

V.
Like the sun out of clouds, warts and all,
The belligerence of the composer
Coming in on a wave of golden love,
Nature denatured, like a bleached sand dollar

To harmonious form, to the elements
Of violence and color, love in abstract,
Viscous, chaotic, a new dissonance
To call consonance, dug sand flung further back--

He's digging until the image appears,
Putting his life aside, his wife in tears,
For what comes, seemingly of its own accord,

What he only understands a little bit
But hopes we can get something out of it,
What exists for us as a self-portrait.

VI.
For how could you know what it is, when you are
Mired in ecstasy, your own private stone,
At turns of phrase tuned to immaculate bars
That become something different, what you somehow own.

You scan the tabloids for who the song's about
In lieu of looking within, for the blame
At what takes you back to your hardest bout
With sanity, drowned in waste, regret and shame

And wishing to disappear, to never feel
A thing again, that's how it turns its wheel
And you hold to its rope through deepest fog

As if it knows you, and will save you somehow,
Though it only falls, to nothing at all, down
Like any other invisible God.

VII.
The stone figures in the sand are alive
According to the Indigenous; we
Think of them as Art, created from desire
For the higher, however incompletely

Understood. The tides seem something expressed,
A subtler music, so distant you'll re-
Harmonize the clouds, whose colors can't be guessed,
Just glows caught on their being's minor keys

With the full weight of your longing imposed.
And your emptiness is filled with echoes
Retrieved in quarantined notes, flat impressions ...

We call it, what fades the coastline to gray,
The imagined, what the stone figures would say.
It's the only way to understand them.

VIII.
Fish through my hair, and other anomalies
From the 99% of life unseen ...
We call them dreams, these partial memories
Of old realities, where any scene

Can be played again, any phantasy
Concocted to a thing, but what is this?
The entertainment's electricity
From last night still entrains your synapses ...

That's the dream you want, a meal pre-made to dine,
For the subliminal is too sublime.
What fancy of yours burns through this construction?

The creator you don't know leaves a name.
It is a talisman to further realms,
For it lives beyond any creation.

IX.
A name that is but a word, but a sound
Provides the difference needed between
Receiver and received, the free and bound,
For all will know what the artist has gleaned

Too easily. It is as if the form
That is all it is instantly melts away
To some universal feeling of warm
That precedes whatever tints that were played

Negotiating with the subject, its sense,
Which is only ever the audience,
Which is always only the void, a lack.

It starts off with that, and to that returns
In an infinite loop of what's never learned,
The eyes that catch fire to revert, to black.

X.
But there, at work, is an actual poet
Found on the pencil smears under the eaves,
For the plans are not the dwelling, as yet,
However much they accumulate leaves.

She gathers the strays from a world built of words
To find they have voices, stories to unpack
To whoever will listen, and the birds
That come out of her pathos only lack

A mind to perceive them, the gift for her
To carry. It can't be shared; so in softer,
More desperate keys, she turns them into beasts

To be slayed by the Gods of the brook's egress,
Falsified, but true music nonetheless,
Fruit of a voice that sings, but cannot speak.

XI.
Yet there is nary a note of regret
For the words of her enemies on her lips,
For hoarding the sensuous for private
Purposes, for all the betrayals slipped,

For she's kept the perfect hostage, the not
Yet created, what the collective songs
Promised before falling unfulfilled and caught
Revealing nothing but how much we long

For expression, but have nothing to show,
Unarticulate, inexplicable,
And the glow of the afternoon overture

Takes over our senses, assumes our heartbeat
Til the kalimba thrum thumbs lift, and we
Recall nothing, least of all who we were.

XII.
And now I have picked up the rattle gourd
That has so much to say, all of it me.
What is there to make of this landed sword?
What can I say when all there is to see

Can be shared? That is, it can't be called art.
It's not of the original, the private
That speaks to what we refuse to make part
Of the humanity that would devour it

As its just dessert for shared suffering
As if there is no other offering
But the tribute of the already known,

The almighty owned, not things without sense
Adrift from time and space and our omniscience,
The only things that are worth expression.

XIII.
Though the poem is no more of spirit
Than anything else, and we reject it no
More than other small things, still we fear it,
Quivering like, beneath a jet, a crow,

Yet the incommunicable comes through stones
And eyes that cause the pains of compassion
And the trajectories of each quip blown
Like a talisman to eyes that are ashen.

The symbols are our own, they have become
The measure of our striving, far from home,
As if we would be solved like an equation

With only the gibberish of the tribe
To hold up to the skies, to inscribe
Permanence among the unseen nations.

XIV.
Still I chase after the invisible
Moth, though I can't pretend it torments me
Or even that it's any more real
Than an urge inside me to be,

Though nothing I create bears a resemblance,
It's like a carnival barker smaller
Than a fly, this insistent voice, "Your chance,"
It says, for adoration and dollars,

To be heard, obeyed, to rise to the top
Of every murky barrel. It would stop
You dead off any scent that you could track—

It's meant for the children of the dark, a prize
To think the world will change if they are recognized.
It's kindness, then, to take the promises back.

XV.
Drummers in the afternoon, like houses
Speak that strange ambition too, wresting cool
From wherever it hides and rouses
For whatever reason it chooses to

The rat-a-tat of unmoored ambition,
But still there's something, something that it knows
But cannot reach, from another musician,
Presented like the sky, wrapped in a glow,

As natural and divine as one's breathing,
Forever elusive, ever leaving,
The drum roll at the end of the tunnel,

It's enough, this light, for sacrificial
Rites, the small i self for the superficial
Delights of objects dancing to the null.

XVI.
No one's between the speaker and listener,
Or is there? We appeal to the middle
No matter where we are, like a tracker
Returns to due north. It's far too brittle

Otherwise, for us. We won't hear of it
Until the visible pundits approve
And won't speak freely without a "love it!"
From our ham-handed fixer nearby, to prove

On terms acceptable to the naked
Expression of collective power, faked
Like a game of chance, cards on the table

With numbers victorious. A different voice,
Plangent and heavenly, still in its choice
Will wait, until we've finished such fables.

XVII.
The blue girl who dispenses pain to you
Why is it hard to believe she's the muse
Humming from Lyra, from Hades rescued?
You gather with shaking hands what you'll use

To the paper. And it's comfortable,
This world beyond the mind, where memories flow
Disguised as the future, voluble
Utterance that shocks as it soothes. We go

To it, never knowing if it's really there,
Despite clean lines and architecture, bare,
Impossible to capture, thus valueless.

For it is only what we lack, an answer,
Exquisite thing that brings out the dancer.
We call it chaos, what's to the flesh a guess.

XVIII.
Whatever art is there, it disappears
In the mysteries of living, lessons
On the wind, the razor-thin timbre clears
And loses coherence, its finesse in

Limbo, aureoles akimbo, missing
The meaning it had but a moment ago,
Though, unlike life, it's remembered, trembling
Still seems to flow through the bloodstream. You follow

Like it was there, but it's not any more,
There is only a desire for closure,
The dumb notes circling the remembering brain

As the ghost limb melody fills up the hills,
Its trills billow through the late windowsills,
Take the town, in mid-pirouette down a drain.

XIX.
Love we call the feeling we get from the sound
Of the song, or the look on the paint, or
The way the characters talk as they found
Out the story. As if that's what it's for,

Our regard, when we cannot even look
At ourselves, even when looking, unaware
Who the gods are, these artists or ourselves, hooked
On the outside catch, the proffered picture,

Not as a gifted glimpse of what we are,
Not as being aware of our own power,
IE. loving ourselves, but as a rod

Where we are as sheep, chaff to wheat, lead to gold,
So far beyond us we release our hold,
To dispute among ourselves who's the true God.

XX.
The truth is love and it is beauty though
It disperses us like rats, even when
The truth-teller dresses it in the most
Refractive threads. The arctic winds come in

To manage us, as calmness becomes coldness,
To shake off, in the eyes of beholders,
When the coping mechanisms regress,
The second-hand treachery like soldiers,

Which is only the sincere desire
To connect, find friends among liars
Waving goodbye, escape them finally.

It's the season of mental illness, when
Truth can no longer be held back again.
The ways of man and God are a mystery.

XXI.
Like wind-up guitars the sound of Africa,
In no way does it prepare for the lofts
Of inner Bronx, result of the diaspora,
What they've been turned into, no longer soft,

But a flame of rage and Milar pure land,
Heaven's voice through inconceivable pain.
Or maybe it's the pain we understand
And heaven is the thing too far away.

And maybe it's this absence heaven craves,
The mourning for what's lost, the urge to save
What seemed to be real until it disappeared,

As if it was something, anything at all.
The retch of our senses, the unacceptable,
Must be gifts the distant heavens hold dear.

XXII.
For us they are gifts to question. There must
Once have been a piece of art that was bad,
But could we ever know it, being just
To our survival needs, what makes us sad?

A book of poems! Unreadable although
I drink it in like this undrinkable
Cup of coffee, to be surprised, by no,
With, like heaven, the "not I," unable

To merge awareness, as if that's the goal,
The instinct to follow is dig the hole
And find nothing as far as you can go,

But what glamorous ores along the way!
The masks you abandoned in a fit of play,
Such secrets of who you are interred below.

XXIII.
Bless this darkness, for you would not exist
Without it. But you chase with flashlight
What seems so separate, poised to resist,
The eternal shadow forever in flight.

That's how a solo becomes a duet,
The incomplete finds itself faced with a kiss
Exactly equal to the force against it,
Thus to create new, beautiful conflicts,

And we who sit listening remember
The harmonious, what was complete before
The double, the stranger, came from charged air,

And we enter the darkest of frontiers
With nothing but joy, affection and tears,
As if we know now just how to get there.

XXIV.
Here a stretch of coast, achingly beautiful,
Immaculately desolate, thoroughly
Boring gives way to a strophe of usable
Soprano sax solo, in a song we

Have all heard before. He was in New Orleans
When they recorded it, and he came right in
—And now, 45 years later, the sea greens
Are gone, there's no sky, no sun, only him

And his pretensions to Sidney Bechet
And the whole fabled lore of the Beatlés.
Maybe some jelly beans were left on the tray

As he looked at the changes, pay was arranged,
The ambient baffles were moved into range
And he fingered the runs he might play.

XXV.
This poet from the 19th century
Is afraid of me. He's doomed to be
My precursor forever, or so it seems
He says, as his present turns to history

And he debates the sun and shadows with me.
I say they are only symbols, but he
Believes them lies, and it would be too easy
To leap where I do, to conclude, says he,

With hindsight's view, where he would always lose,
And those who would posthume would always choose
The latest iteration of the curve,

For time has not yet ended: There are still
Judgments. The poet and I are one will
For you, reader, the one we can observe.

XXVI.
There is too much light, there is too much art
But darkness never enough, the divide
Turns to void too easily, the central heart
Gets bedecked with mind, its beloved guide

As if the war was already fought and
Decided. The blueprints of the blue sky
Just prophesy geometries that end,
The chords resolve too soon, and nullify

The infinite, which relies on discord's
Endless spread. That quiver on the record
Betrays the ghost you cannot see, your own

On each other side, in a cruel mirror
Where you paint your face without one being there—
The empty glare, the inexhaustible alone.

XXVII.
So I imagine an angel, to
Look at myself once again, and to know
What would otherwise be hidden, the blue
Of heaven as the blue of my sorrow

In a duet of bliss and pain, heaven
With earth, the broken lifted, the elate
Transformed through being broken, a communion
That breaks the bread of each one's strict estate

Of focused knowing. The moan of memory
Hums like bees. And joy is all the tones breathe.
The echo calls to still the trembling feel.

The gap fills: Sandalphon laughs at the gag
Of what's released from the heavy, empty bag ...
A simple squeal, my fingers on the prayer wheel.

XXVIII.
The play, like a baby, comes from the dark
Like all the crackling things that are not real
In a tossed night of sleep. The light will mark
Itself in each crevasse for its reveal.

It finds itself in absence, as you cure
Yourself in catharsis, the terrifying
Deception where even the deceiver
Believes the alchemy. It's clarifying

To chase the shadows dancing in the lamp,
And know that that's your vehicle to stamp
As well these subtle contours of your soul;

Darkness, the only canvas you will know,
The only pen, the only stroke of note:
Such fire in that irascible lump of coal.

XXIX.
It's something that didn't exist before,
What is born of nothing but desire to know,
Not knowledge itself, that crystal absorber,
But what makes itself, a God of sorts, whole

In the spiral curl of the recursive
Experience re-inferred, like fresh breath
What was old, once, now pure, and to be lived
In the rhythm that is love. It's the path

Of visible, not rooted, light, that drops
Its aromatic leaves, a gleaming crop
For the new yield from the darkness. The seeds

Must foster a further reality
For spirits to bear responsibility—
It's called freedom, what the universe needs.

XXX.
And so what if the records are stolen?
The mediocre borrow, the great ones
Keep! Ubiquity needs isolation
To pull new unities at will, undone

From the ties of all-to-all, and reapplied
To a singular path before the whole,
The eccentric way of the countryside
Sending all its saviors to the circle

To play strange notes on familiar instruments;
The airs of humus fill the cities with scents,
And they're faced with a choice, to join or split—

They don't like it but can't turn their ears away.
It is merely the call to their own way.
Will they listen, or toss dead blooms against it?

XXXI.
What stirs within, from the heart of the cosmos
Is distance, for it would otherwise be too close;
How a few petals strike the center of our souls
Disguised as angelic blessings, mere grace.

They would only be words to ourselves, but for
The spiritual bureaucracy layers
In between, that make the flowers seem more
Immortal, of some familiar prayers.

The most vivid pictures you have never known,
Or so, from the mirror, you are shown—
You think the moon and not your madness is real,

So much passes in that day to night frenzy
There's just shadow before your reagency;
It's the only way you know how to feel.

XXXII.
In the immortality of the void
You have to let go of everything you know
To become another, to say to the destroyed:
I am, and to all that overwhelms: I flow.

As you reach out to what so far away
Surrounds you, transparence and magnificence,
You pull in all it is with what you say,
Your artist's rendition just as immense,

The otherwise unimaginable
Drops like secrets whispered at the table
In a procession of glittering playthings

That turn back into you so readily
They must dissolve again, the forms you see,
Which feel, now that they are real, like nothing.

XXXIII.
The rattling of the rain is far too much
Truth for us to bear. There's nothing to see
So we can't say we perceive the truth as such,
Just its rattle from far away, where we

Once agreed to leave, to reclaim the lost
Idea, what permeates all we think
Here, where nothing exists per se, just a host
Of godlike structures built by man. We blink

And they're gone, and it's like we're really grieving,
The strings of Orpheus sound out our leaving
As bracelets of stars listen from our home

To what we have learned, in our orphaned blue,
What we can't remember, felt to be true
And sung, alone in our echoing dome.