David told me that years ago I said:
“Fishing a Canadian lake is Mozart,
ocean fishing is Wagner.” Now I think
in a storm, the Saint Lawrence River
is Götterdämmerung, some streams
trill Scarlatti, run into head waters,
where I have fished for Gluck,
Debussy, Stravinsky, Shostakovich.
I caught nothing. I still keep fishing
in musical waters: I caught a perch
in a Chinese Lake that was Puccini,
looked exactly like a perch
from the Ashokan Reservoir.
I trapped crustaceans in the River Thames, Purcell—
his flowing theater and sacred music,
not far from Devil’s Acre. A little north,
at Oxfordshire where the Thames (Purcell)
becomes Thomas Tallis, I caught rainbow trout,
Salve Intemerata Sanctus et Benedictus.
***
Missa Solemnis from Bach to Weber
is like fishing for a “manager fish”
in the Caribbean, where slaves had to save
the best fish for their manager.
Take the Dead Sea, lowest point on earth,
lowering every year—where there’s no music
or fish in the sea’s murderous salt,
there are bacteria colonies near shore.
Still a diver in full salty gear told me he’s heard
someone or something practicing
bubbling-bassoon-scales at sea bottom,
“clown of the orchestra,” bassoon.
The Dead Sea Scrolls may be read
basso profondo, or by castrati
in their lost art. Since we first became human,
when we fished, and hunted, there was music,
love songs much like a leopard’s purring,
hands clapped to dance, heel and toe percussions;
mamas hummed wordless music that became lullabies.
Visiting fisherman, I quickstepped barefoot
over sharp Dead Sea stones to swim,
Goddamn, I cut my feet,
but the tough bare-footed Israeli I swam with
stepped and danced on the stones
as if he were in a make believe ballroom.
I asked him with a smile,
“Do you think your feet might not be Jewish—”
a poet soldier, he didn’t like my joke.
***
I remember how friends swim,
and those who cannot swim,
original and conventional swimmers.
They carried invisible musical instruments.
No beach umbrellas. I netted crawdads
near New Orleans, where the Mississippi
became Bunk Johnson, Louis Nelson Delisle,
Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, the Hot 8,
depending on Ole Miss’s mood.
***
Traveller, not Robert E. Lee’s horse,
I was an underwater swimmer in Copland’s Hudson
without sheet music, mask, or snorkel.
I would go down 30 feet, hear the music
of cold water in my ears. Was it Bernstein’s Candide?
I heard cadenzas, never a full orchestra.
I dived with my dog Sancho after rocks
into a brook, the Bushkill, John Cage—
a dog-man game we both loved.
If Sancho was hunting in the woods,
I didn’t have to whistle to call him,
I played opera on a phonograph and he’d come
swimming across the John Cage Bushkill
from the often twelve-toned wilderness
of Schönberg, where Arnold was
the Rondout Reservoir, full of Sprech Musik,
between singing and speaking,
a Pierrot Lunaire waterfall. Sancho would run
through water music in the Dorian mode,
somewhere between universal Stravinsky’s
The Rite of Spring and Debussy’s Sunken Cathedral—
depending on the season. From a glen,
I saw Satie trickle, refusing to be grand.
I heard Berg and Bartok were flooding in Vienna.
Beauty, I bet my life, is not an entertainment,
it ennobles—contrast, not conflict,
F means forte, “loud,” not war. Yes, there is
reiteration, overtones, dissonance, harmony
vs counterpoint. Two melodic lines may go together.
Still there are those who prefer a person’s body
on many occasions to his or her art.
—2018