Champagne Potpourri

Bruce Bond ~ Mary Dixon ~ Christine Hsu

Joshua Miner ~ John Grey

 

 

 

 

Bartók

Bruce Bond

 

What is the best way for a composer to reap the full benefits of his studies in peasant music? It is to assimilate the idiom of peasant music so completely that he is able to forget all about it and use it as his musical mother tongue.

 

 I. Budapest (1920)

 

The day Rumania fell

below the Hungarian border, he was called

a traitor for his work. His record needle

plowed through the gravel of white noise,

black vinyl, a peasant's bagatelle.

Holding his ear to the phonograph bell,

he closed his eyes and listened through the hiss:

long black skirts spreading in the mountain fog.

 

II. The Bronx

 

Solos mainly. Ever since they sold the upright, he

and his wife boxed their music for four hands. Withdrawing

deep into the small hours, he slouched over a baby grand

waiting to play. As they watched movies from the homeland,

tanks rolled soundlessly from one reel to the next.

It was 1942. His letters unanswered,

the silence from Hungary curled into his mouth

like a mother tongue.

 

 

 

Bizet

 

It started with his tongue, his throat,
the inflammation that flared up
from time to time; all his life
the spells, the fever, as if unfinished

music blew the embers in him,
flew them through the path of drink,
of song. It started with his throat,
history says, knowing so little

where death begins, if it’s the sound
he conceived gazing in the Seine,
the melody that followed him
though the maze of soiled streets,

in and out of moods that fell
like shadows from the high walls.
In the end he swore the Paris air
had poisoned him. In his head

the two bold notes of ground bass
dragged from one ear to another,
forever dragging, as if to carve
a darker path against the dark.

All night the thrum of the chamber,
the fray of the bow. It was the best
he could do, his Carmen, and yet
not all he expected, not quite

the slash and burn of another spring.
Still he threw its Spanish aria
like a flower into the chest of his
last day. He too was a Carmen.

He loved both bull and the brute
that killed him, the flare of the song
with such duress, such light to shed.
There’s power in the absurd

violence raised to an art,
in the eye of the lover who stares
you in the face and says, I want,
I want. Though more than this: I am.

The love-sick corporal in the drama—
who was he but the animal
he knew so little and so became.
In the end the two bold notes

dragged through Bizet like a fighter
and his dead bull, until the one ear,
the first, went weary, deaf. True,
the animal always dies offstage.

But something of the fanfare—
the dancers, picadors, bandilleros—
spilled into footlights, horrified
that such a soldier went so far

he had one ear in the other
world already. No less a beast,
bowed, furious, castrated, armed.
And then the final absurdity.

How fortunate. For those who stay
what more could they want: that leap
of disbelief, the moment the man
plunges his dagger in, plunges

the strong dark chord­—call it the will
to die, to live, to die by living—
and with it the signature dissonance
of the one who cannot love him back—

cannot, will not—the same cold notes
that follow her everywhere,
even as she buckles over the blade
and the song’s blood comes streaming out.

 

 

 

 

Rahab

Mary Dixon

 

The once wild river is tamed

Cherishing trees instead of drowning them.

Horace The Art of Poetry

It would be too complacent to build a nest

between one's fatalism and one's pleasures.

                Robert Pinsky An Explanation of America

 

Oleanders bend like willows; the hopping thrush

dodges waves to reproduce amidst the flood;

the kingfisher, his turquoise crest erect,

scans the water for darting minnows,

but black, the water, is too deep and still

swirling with leaves and twigs.

Examining the turtle dove, smoothing gray

on flat stone, she sang briefly, now longer,

so long that she mistook for stability, the umbrellaed

acacias scarred in river's torrent, their leaves and

spines drawn inward like hooking fingers

clutching the back of her arms.

The kingfisher dropped to reeds and

swayed impatient in the heaving;

A sun bird in clustered red over emerald

and irridescent purple on the black of his breast

perched in the accacia, and her eyes scanned

the amphitheatered valley.

Moabite plain root and balsam wood,

too soft to burn, she was not like the stalks of flax

dried to fuel the belly of the cooking pot.

The gray turtle dove, her eye blinking white,

picked golden stalks, slender, elegant, useful, then

lifting soundlessly, flew

over and through the sun, bronzed and pedestaled

on the cold green arms of acacias to sink so near the swollen beach.

She followed the bird, her arms aching to lift,

to wreathe shafts into that woven mesh of gold, to nest.

This season weathers storm and flood,

and worshipping saplings bend great sighs of praise

to the bloated Jordan, whose orgying, and moaning

toils water that is alive and bulges into the rolling veins

of desert and women,

rushing, a beast to besiege the moon, that hangs

just above the horizon, faint in the blooming day,

a wet dog looming heat.

Treasure, in the lapping up of red and gold,

in the sucking of new rain, in the scrounging

through wet clothes, conquered disdain.

Each time, her song floated and fell, the weaving

harmony unwrapping itself, its play of words

and sound coaxed from pleasure and goaded into grief.

This time, this visitation, this round of dance

and song in lithe turning, required another kind

of sacrifice, no contortions of will and emotions,

no spectacle of desire tainted with greed or lust.

There was no taunting, or accusation in these

two men, strangers, their fingers not hooked,

not fishing,

not shrinking in for lust or wine or lips or backs of arms

or black breasts,

no true confessors whose bones were hardened in words of comfort

and kinship

and payment.

Surreptitiously, they came, their eyes coating

white like cautious doves;

she knew them; she did not know them.

She laid them under her dried flax as rain came,

in fine mist and the ache of flesh on bone that deepens

in moisture and the smell of that great plain steeped in

mud and river, driving all but the hardiest away up into the city

and the mountains and the sky.

She heard the kingfisher calling, a shrill echo,

tenacious as the tuber waiting for spring,

a torment that loathed the fragrant pulse and breath

of acacia’s furred stamens.

In rescue and betrayal, of conflict and trust,

Her breath sapping in violent beating and pulsing gain,

her heart torn between loyalty and retribution,

she perceived the promise, so elegant and

tiny like the delicate flowers

of acacia, adorning the nest..

In relinquishment, there was release

of new song and new word in new emblem

of weft and light; the nest, enwrapping gold and green,

gleamed near the mouth of the raging Jordan,

on the plain of Jericho. On the lips of strangers,

new rhythms cadenced the call of kingfishers

and sequenced the unknown melody.

When the townsmen came looking for spies,

she turned them away with lies and suggestion;

then quietly, with confidence and abandon, she

uncovered the nest birthed under flax

and tied the scarlet cord.

 

 

 

The Farm

Christine Hsu

 

5 bees on Sunday on my brother's bum
10 bees on Monday on my sister's cheek
58 bees on Tuesday helping mama with the honey
21 bees on Wednesday buzzing grandma to sleep
321 bees on Thursday with my pa sitting around
99 bees on Friday dancing with me
1 bee on Saturday by old yeller's grave to keep him company

 

 

 

Beat

Joshua Miner

 

There’s this attractive girl at the compound;

Her father and mine are friends.

Co-workers, really.

Neighbors.

(Our mothers lunch together.)

She grew up in Tennessee and will go back someday.

She’s not exotic.

No neon

In her hair like the Indians,

Or the restaurants and shops they work in Doha

With the wild pink and blue curls, burning

OPEN and PLEASE COME IN

Into the dark. They beat with Western sounds.

The New Downtown is coming

Like an eager pop tune,

Born from metallic seeds dropped from cranes –

Beat-beat, beat, beat-beat, beat –

That later spring up from the sand steel scaffold skeletons

Wearing glass, wires. Think of it: whole organisms

Danced to electronic life on pop music! At some point

They will have little establishments at their feet,

With that fresh, ionized hair burning

Like the others,

And this neon ecology will grow. Out, out,

Even into the water.

Soon there will be innumerable reflections:

AMER-AMER-AMERICAN BEER SOLD HERE

And a series of Arabic curlicues beneath,

Moving with the tide.

This brings to mind the hookah bar

Where we enjoyed each other’s company but knew

There was a distance waiting to come on,

An oil-black ocean

Swelling, stretching between:

“I’m looking at LSU, but we’ll see.”

“Oh yeah?” “Yeah,

I think I want to study biology.” But there are voltaic

Fish just outside, I think to say,

Remembering the reflections curling

To American time.

Because that beat hits the Mideastern waters, too, which licked

The warped wooden pillars (the bar was on the shore)

That night in response, reminding

Us how far away from home we were,

Saying, Shhh, shhh, shhh.

Against the rows of dead tourists’ catamarans they breathed too,

But not in a calming way – no, continually growing

Louder, as if forcing us into silence.

I remember thinking, the Gulf must not like

What’s playing at the bar

For the expatriates.

Shhh. Shhhh. “Man,” – beat-beat –

“You’ve got to try

The strawberry.” SHHHH.

There will be tankers plowing the sea

When morning comes.

 

 

 

Cave-Man

John Grey

 

I emerge from the cave,

eyes blinking, droning

like humming-bird wings.

Who are these.. .are they people?

Blurry faces cover me

like sheets and blankets.

Many hands grab

as if they're holding me together.

Is that what light does?

Unstitch seams? Unscrew bolts?

Wrench the intestine from its bowel,

the arteries from the heart?

Why now of all times?

Why did the wall crack open

and the crowds assemble?

Why can a blind fish

swim out the rest of its sorry life

in its dark forgiving underground aquarium

but a man must float to the surface,

a man must stumble out

into the pawing hands of

police and firemen and government officials?

So they give me something to drink:

harsh water, puerile alcohol.

And they pretend to feed me.

But what have I hunted here?

And speak? Of course I speak?

Like melting ice dripping

into hidden pools.

Like rats scrambling

through sudden fissures.

Like the boisterous plate-shift of earth,

the ominous rumble of distant core.

Reporter shoves a microphone hard against my lip.

Is the world as I remember it?

But I detest memory and have long since

killed the beast.

They sit me before television.

War, disaster, plague, murder.

No underworld, I won't squeal.

They move me to a hospital

but I'd prefer a dungeon.

The nurses wear white

but black's my color.

The doctor is surprised

that I am alive.

So that's what life is...

second hand astonishment.

They cut my hair, shave my beard,

make me wear clothes,

stand me before a mirror,

chortle, "Now you're human."

What a world?

Men as shills and barkers.A looking glass to lie.