Peter Weltner

Five Poems

 

 

After a Schwarzwald Legend

 

The wild, deserted children, the sun-

less ones who hide in Black Mountain,

bring me gifts they’ve found, a triggerless gun,

a wheelless cart, a shirt with a bloodstain

 

on it, broken books, bread too old

to eat, limp flowers, a watch that won’t run.

They say, “Your birthday’s over.  Though it’s cold

where we live, come, have more fun

 

with us.  You’re not happy anyway.”

So I go with them, not the only one

they’ve led astray through woods to play

with them, unguided by the sun

 

setting far west of Black Mountain.

The wolves know what’s to be done.

The owls.  The bats.  The moths.  The rain.

No rest.  No rest at night for everyone,

 

no sleep to be had in their deep caves,

where I’m beset by waking dreams,

the boy I was who knows and saves

me, who has taken me where water streams,

 

but no light gleams, the trees too thick

to let in the sun, but berries and nuts

are plentiful, for toys a round stone, a stick

like a foil, snail slick or oak sap for cuts,

 

windstorms for music. Though the moon’s dun

colored, the stars invisible, why shun

my friends?  They’ve won.  I’ve no cause to run.

I’m one of them now, the free, the sun-

 

less.  I dwell in darkness, darkness in me,

the Black Forest, imagination,

the woodland of poetry

where children are born to abandon.

 

 

 

Buddy Mine

 

Nights in his bedroom are scarier than a dark closet.

Not sleeping, he spies in the ceiling a crack, thin

as a hair.  Is it something to fear?  A sign?  Is it

a writing that says without words, “So we begin,

you and I”?  He watches the crack open and out

of it falls another boy or a man, he can’t decide

which, who he knows is no ghost, no doubt

a friend, because he resembles someone he’s fantasized

about who someday might come to help him.

He has needs, needs deep inside he already

suspects are in danger.  Who is he?  In the dim

room, shades drawn, curtains pulled, “Little buddy,”

the guy says, “identical twins is who we are.

I’m your terror, always with you, nearby or far.”

 

This is real, this story, not a nightmare or dream.

The boy is still very young when he goes hiking

in the hills of the Watchung Mountains, by a stream

that leads him southwest, away from everything

safe and familiar and deep into woods, a forest

of oak, fir, spruce, maple where he can bring

nothing, know nothing.  He’s lost, unable to resist

hiking further and further away, as if home is nothing.

He’s lured by darkness and  a longing for a cave

where he can hide and escape the appeals, the cries

of his father, his mother whose voices mean to save

him, show him the way back, the trail, the ties

to his family, the love he might find or remember

to return to–where they said his life began, in him, in her.

 

Maybe he’s afraid for good reasons.  He comes down

from the mountain, out of the woods, bears his father’s

scolding for scaring them so, his mother’s stern frown,

more pensive than angry.  He’s a wayward boy who errs

daily in too many ways.   What use is it to chastise

him further?  He bows his head.  His dad’s sharp tongue

is critical, biting.  His mother looks away and sighs,

takes his hand and guides him out of the Watchung

Mountains.  Who calls him back?  The woods, the trees,

the brush, the man or boy, he can never tell which,

his twin who waits for him, who sees what he sees,

frightful things, rotting leaves, a dead rabbit, the pitch

black rock he flings back to the forest as if night, the dark,

could be picked up by a boy and smashed on tree bark.

The boy grows old.  He’s found a photo.  He’s staring at

it, shot by a pro sixty years ago for his father’s office

desk, a studio portrait, formal, that

reveals its era–his mother’s fine Nordic head twice

the size of her more beautiful daughter’s, the boy in a blue

tweed suit and tie and tie pin, all three

gray in the picture, the style when it was new.

What he is studying most, most needs to see,

besides their intelligent looks and thin, sweet smiles,

is how his lips, eyes might betray what he had no right

to, dread, wrong in so lucky a boy, no trials

to face yet, a blessed child of love and light.

And yet he still seeks him by day in woods, by night

in a bedroom, in a closet, his twin, his buddy, the fright,

the fear who sought him.  Who is old now, too.  Who gave him nothing.

Who taught him nothing.  Who was only a crack in a ceiling.

 

 

 

Darl Bundren, Home from France

 

The war was like home, Mississippi,

unraveling, spilling, a stuck hog’s guts

slopping a tub.  Ben’s blasted knee,

Dalton tangled on the wire, Clay’s nuts

 

blown off, floating in a moon-lit pool,

Leith burning up.  It was a Mississippi

rain they died in, a runny stool

of mud the color of sassafras tea,

 

bi-planes hungry as buzzards.  My mother

never loved me.  My dad’s like God,

feckless, lazy, toothless, more a bother

to his kids than a comfort.  I guess I’m odd.

 

No use with tools.  My fishing rod

catches nothing.  I’m good as dead,

bayoneted.  Where’s the watch, the gold fob

I bought in Paris?  Flies buzz in my head.

 

Maybe it’s a whizbang .  Maybe it’s time.

Back home, I’ve got three brothers, a sister.

But I was born in France, in the slime,

the muck, the roiling muddy water

 

flooding trenches with blood.  I like a nice inn,

an estaminet, a glass of red wine,

a bed of my own where I can sin

if I l want to miles away from the line

 

and listen to the rain on a strange roof

and think of home and how it’s the same

here as there, war the only truth,

the way the world’s been made.  My name

 

is Darl.  Darl is my brother, too.  You are

Darl also, like Dalton, caught, pricked

by the barbs, Clay, balls flung far,

high up, dropping beside me, Leith tricked

 

into running too soon by the sun.  Buddies.

Someone’s friend, if not mine.  Alone, I stare

through walls trying to see how He sees

the world, even Mississippi where

 

no one’s ever at home and the train

I ride in goes backwards to France

and in the hot July sun the rain

pours up from the earth.  Luck, chance,

 

like jokes, make me laugh.  Insanity?

My brother Cash tells me I’m out

of balance.  But if flood, fire can’t bury

the dead, why not cry or shout

 

or laugh?  At you.  At God.  At the war

in my head that never stops, won’t quit,

that sticks and burns like roofing tar

on Cash’s skin.  Like cement on bone.  I sit

 

in my room in Jackson, sharp as a knife

I’m told, and hear the lies they say.  Be

peaceful, brother.  The war, that life,

France is over.  You’re home.  It’s Mississippi.

 

 

 

Deconsecration

 

No more altar, vestments, stained glass.

The last cross is taken from the church.

Broken plaster lies where the font was.

A priest in a white-washed world, you search

 

for the black you wore, the dirge you sang

as if it were all the liturgy meant

when in the bell tower the bells rang

and no one came and no one went,

 

the marriage ended between him and you,

as love sometimes quits between lovers,

God having left the place, who knew

your refusal, all that suffering uncovers,

 

reveals in the heart, the sanctuary

unattended to, the hymns unsung,

too few in the pews, the daily

strain of unlocking the doors, the tongue

 

silenced by unbelief, the slow deadening

pace of days.  Outside, the homeless

line up for meals, patiently waiting,

the mouths to feed, the sores to bless.

 

 

 

Eight Voices after the War

 

•  Kathleen Ferrier

 

Her voice is an underworld.  It is the soul’s

descent.  There’s an umber color to it or a red

like the last embers from a fire that glows

in the dark.  Perhaps she is singing for the dead

more than the living, for fall as much as spring.

Joy blossoms when, after wars, the earth is revived,

but she is bidding the world an early goodbye,

not wanting to leave it just when happiness’s arrived

like an unexpected friend.  She mustn’t cry.

There’s good that’s left, and a singer’s never alone.

She has her voice, her art.  But only it can know

where she must travel.  She feels a splintering, like a bone

breaking inside her.  Her heart’s weighed down by stone.

She’s often cold.  When she sings of forever, it’s snow

on a river with no bridge to cross it, nowhere to go.

 

•  Elisabeth Schwarzkopf

 

She won’t let the photographer film her.  She’s nearly ninety.

It would be unfair to her public to let them see her

when she is no longer a beauty.  Severity

must be part of art, the need to deter a listener

from confusing what he sees on stage with what he hears.

There’s been too much gossip, mean-spirited aspersions

about how she behaved in Germany during those years.

She was young, no Marschallin but poor.  Conversions

came easily to her.  Call it ambition.  But listen.

When she sings, don’t you notice something strange?

You’re returning to a world you thought time had forbidden

you.  Don’t you feel as if you’ve gone home to where

you’ve never been, to some past where you might change

into what you’ve always wanted to be but did not dare?

Aren’t you breathing a foreign air?  And, if you feel sad,

think of what art could have made of the life you never had.

 

•  Maria Callas

 

Nothing is possible for her anymore.  The gods

have abandoned her.  Where’s tragedy?  All

is sorrow, boredom, grief.  Each dull day plods

like an old Greek in a ripped black shawl.

Her rooms are full of expensive things, Chinese

jars, silk curtains, hand woven rugs, portraits of her.

Meaningless.  She doesn’t belong alone.  Please,

she says, restore what’s been lost.  Hera, Demeter,

take me back to my mountain, to the olive grove

where goddesses dwell, the smell of fruit ripening

in the sun.  To the temple, to the stage I love.

Teach me how to live again.  How to sing

once more.  Let me be passionate.  Thrill to the din

of applause.  Io sono Medea.  I kill my children.

 

•  Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

 

A great storm releases the Dutchman.  Weary of the sea,

a singer is a mariner, too, praying for the tempest

to end.  He’s tired of torment, troubled by his memory

of battles.  If he could find his love, he would rest.

Say she is Senta, dreaming, singing at her loom

where she is weaving a song of an ocean-tossed,

wind-battered man.  Suddenly he stands in her room.

But his voice is doomed to wander, to feel lost

until the nightmare ends and a better world begins.

His own murdered his brother.  His home was destroyed.

The horrors of the Russian front, his country’s sins

haunt him wherever he performs.  In Italy, he’s employed

by Americans to entertain their prisoners of war,

his voice a just healed wound, an oddly beautiful scar.

 

•  Hugues Cuenod

 

A voice pour les entre-deux-guerres, for Monteverdi

sing alongs at the Princesse’s salon, American

sewing machine heiress.  A voice created for mélodies

and lieder, a sweet comprimario voice that began

as a boy soprano and stayed small as a piccolo,

with a bright, high vibrato.  Think of sunlight off a man’s silk

tie or wisps of floating mist fast vanishing below

the snow line of a Swiss valley or the difference between milk

and cream.  Delightful filigree, ornaments.  A stream

from a glacier.  An old silver spoon.  An ancient gold

plate Madame would serve macarons on.  A dream

of his dying like Socrate, platonically, hemlock cold

at the end.  At one hundred and five, Hugues Cuenod

marries his husband.  He toasts him with high proof pernod.

 

•  Giuseppe di Stefano

 

Impoverished son of a carboniere, soldier in the war,

briefly a pupil of Cuenod, he struts with a tenor’s

passion, a gondolier’s style.  His technique’s far

from perfect, a young fighter’s not an old warrior’s

skill in him.  But he always wins, is afterwards the braggart,

cheerfully smirking.  Floria, don’t give him the bum’s

rush.  He’s seen your brush dew wet.  Your heart

enjoys his wooing.  Why care how quickly he comes?

He’s impetuous in his singing, too.  Like a Sicilian melon,

his butt is firm and musky as cypress.  Why delay?

His voice is a silvery wave on the Mediterranean.

No matter that everyone’s dead at the end of the play,

it’s the ardency, speed, you live by that sings.  Old, di Stefano

is beaten in the tropics.  Death finds him to be untypically slow.

 

•  Franco Corelli

 

Rock Hudson’s good looks, screen idol clichés befitting

him as no other singer then, his voice a trumpet

celebrating a hero, Manrico fighting, Radames setting

off to war.  His high-C-maddened fans would let

Don Alvaro’s or Calaf’s or Rodolfo’s last as long

as he could hold them before they’d applaud, disrupt-

ing the music with their bravos.  Gymnastics, not song,

rivals’ claques would grumble and rudely interrupt

him with booing and catcalls.  Corelli is afraid.

The public scares him.  His voice is at the whim

of their passions.  The stage terrifies him.  Has he stayed

on too long?  Why won’t he quit before they leave him?

They don’t understand.  At every performance, he

must surmount fearsome heights to be Corelli.

 

•  Zinka Milanov

 

“Madame Milanov,” I say to her backstage,

after her recital, two of her recordings in my hands

for her to sign.  She does so gladly on the first page

of the Trovatore libretto.  I think she understands

my pleasure.  She inscribes the inside of the box

that holds the Cavalleria LP’s with an even grander

flourish of her ‘Z’, like the curl in the tail of a fox

or a curlicue question mark.  “You’re a quick learner,”

she says to me, patting me on the head.  I’m fifteen.

“So wise to love the opera.”  I shake the pianist’s

hand, her brother, who played as an interlude the scene

Debussy wrote of the sea-sunken cathedral.  He insists

it was nothing when I compliment him.  Rusalka’s

“Song to the Moon” was the last aria Milanov would sing

that evening, floating her famous high pianissimos

through the hall as if to me, my world, just beginning.