Peter Weltner

Wagner and the Music of the Wound

 

for Adam Henry Carrière in celebration of Danse Macabre’s 16th year

 

1.  Kurvenal

 

No one can ever know Tristan’s pain.

No one he knows will ever visit

his realm.  Wounds healed must hurt again.

Shut your eyes tightly as you sit

in a dark room with its curtains

drawn, listening to the wind,

birdsong, waves crashing.  More rain’s 

on the way, Tristan.  You have sinned,

though no one can tell you how you

might be freed from the suppuration

of a wounded soul.  Tormented man, sing a new

tune no one will comprehend.  When done,

song over, try to sleep, though you bleed onto

your sheets all night, the stains of your passion

flowing freely from your flesh like blood from the mark of Cain.

 

2.  Klingsor

 

The nature of man is a lust proclaimed as treason.

Winter’s chill is in the air, secluded thunder

rumbling in clouds.  It is the end of life season,

of decay, of a rot that is no reason for wonder.

 

As the morning sun shines on fresh snow,

its shadeless glow invades his brain,

the cold in his mind where nothing will grow,

where there’s nothing to see, nothing to gain

 

by thinking, the world outside too bright

to contemplate, an icy fire

that turns his thoughts ashen white,

white as maggots, as the ruffs of choir

 

boys at the altar rail consuming the host,

as the frozen soaked pelt of a woodchuck

festering in woods.  He soul is lost,

in a perverse sort of justice, cruel fate or bad luck,

 

who knows?  Suffering is a kind of horror

show.  Lock the doors.  Close the shutters.

Solitude.  Make day like night.  Be a boarder

inside your own home.  His heart flutters

 

with longing, the only god he’s ever known.

If he must live, let it be in a cave

as a bony stalactite no lamp ever shone

on by spying spelunkers, quiet as a grave

 

while water drips, drips, drips

off him, forming its mineral

deposits below.  His heart grips

tighter, but his garden’s been cast into a funereal

 

darkness, the poisonous air no flower can bear

to breathe, as cold as his flesh is, his mind

like ice, the wound that’s everywhere,

white, like tiny albino fish, translucent, blind.

 

There are no petals blossoming here, no more

flower maidens. Self-castration freezes the heart.

His life is an absolute loneliness, an empty core,

a void, and each godless day that passes tears him further apart.

 

3.  Marke

 

From a break in the clouds, a plait of light blue

caresses a field of golden sunflowers

blue as the sea their petals float in.  Night time shouldn’t require you

to believe, upon wakening,

what you gave credence to while sleeping, no matter how beautiful

it might have been, beckoning you elsewhere.  

 

As a child, he would cower before morning like a wolf at the door,

at some monster that might dare

slip from a garden on snail-slick bellies

into the room he had locked against them the night before.

He should love the world the more the more he leaves it.  Light showers

a field of sunflowers with a blue bluer than the sky’s.  A monster is shaking

his bed envious, enraged, more mournful than Mary Shelley’s

at having been deceived.  Flowers, monsters he confused as a boy.  Now true.  

Now realities.  This hurt, the betrayal inside his soul festering like monstrous diseases.

 

4.  Tristan

 

The place where I woke up was not where

I’d been.  I saw no land, no people, no sun

there.  I can’t describe anything,  I would not dare

to.  But I have been there before.  The oblivion

I am destined to return to.  Eternal night.

Not what the soul in daylight desires.

Not its bright morning, the sun fiery, ever golden.

Not the shimmering days of pining liars

as lovers are, defying the night I would expire

in.  Must my anguish torch me forever?  Let me sleep

again and dream the dreamless dream that’s far more deep

than any light can be.  I mean silence.  I mean

absence.  Melot wounded me with the wound I’d sought from

him to end my many betrayals.  Even Isolde at first was far too keen 

to heal me.  The sole cure for past wounds is a last embrace, our kisses’ delirium.

 

5.  Amfortas

 

Once more and again, why must I be revived back to life?

Why do you force me to live

in pointless pain, incessant strife

like madmen?  Why must I survive?

Look at me.  Stare deep into

my oozing wound.  Who can forgive

my forsaken vows?  My blood must flow

it so poisons me.  Plunge your swords

into me.  Set me free.  Be a hero,

each one of you knights.  There are no words

in poetry, no music sharp enough to knife

out my sin.  Let me be slain 

by my own agony.  I am unholy.  My reign 

in this shrine has been ruinous  There is no sacred spear

to heal me with its touch.  No guileless fool.  Only a love I’ve made lustful by fear.

 

6.  Parsifal

 

He imagines the sun he sees is a cold, icy white

over fields still glazed with frost on a morning

when spring flowers are blossoming, a wintry bite

lingering in the air, tender leaves unfurling,

clutching to greening shrubs and trees.  Miles

trekked without sleep.  A truth-seeker he might call

himself whoever he is as he climbs over stiles

and fences round a meadow to a graveyard wall

where the buried are rumored to be resurrected,

on Good Friday or so he has been told though left

to wonder, too, if the awakened dead are led

to somewhere invisible, obscure to the living, bereft

as they are, despite vital voices from the night refuting the old

lie that even in paradise the winter sun never sets, yet burns stone cold.

 

7.  Epilogue, after Hölderlin

 

Their quieted hearts were filled

with a silent contentment

and, as from the beginning,

alone, their desires were satisfied.

 

Such is humanity.  If fortune

is true and they be granted

its gifts by a god, though

they see and understand none of it,

 

let them know that, if they must suffer,

they might thereby learn how to name

the beloved things, to speak the blessèd

words whose music buds and blossoms like flowers.

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