Sonata Mulattica

Dull

the days before me,

slack the reins, my horse run off.

What a fable—

to be dunked in kisses,

sprinkled with doubts,

then slathered with high-holy

redundance.

I’m a shadow in sunlight,

unable to blush

or whiten in winter.

Beautiful monster,

where to next—

when you can hear

the wind howl

behind you, the gate

Let them swagger. He can see what

they’re up to, with their loopy gestures

and loud poetry, calculated and mean.

Better to be laughed at inside the theater

than out on the pitch—here’s warmth,

finally, and raucous applause spilling down

from the rows of cramped arabesques

thicker than a general’s chest. Let Dusty Bob

boo hoo over the pratfalls of African Sal

while yours truly fiddles, keeping time with

his good wood leg—laughter, when it comes,

is a slap in the face only if he deigns

to turn them that particular cheek.

Still, a buck’s always a buck.

He’ll wait in the wings, with his half-talent

and disguised ambition; he’ll take on

the chores they toss at him with nary a squeak—

pull curtains, fill buckets of sand, mop up

vomit in the boxes at the interval

then lurch backstage in time to fasten

Jerry’s waistcoat, straighten Tom’s buffoon ruff.

He’ll become indispensable, so that someday

he can dispense with those who’ve kept him

close by, out of habit; he’ll fiddle and stomp and haul slop

until they think him inconsequential,

and he will hate them all the more for believing it.

So that’s the world’s jig: Fall in step

or be left behind; hop to it—Please, sir,

the aisles are for circulating; relieve yourself

elsewhere. As if there’s an elsewhere

to get to around here.

Dear Master, Dear Dear Master,

Do not sigh so heavily, do not droop

into Mad Melancholy, look up!

I am here to serve. I await

a Word—any word!—that I may

set down before you an array of Nature’s

most flagrant Outbursts, heaped Evidence

of Fortunes fought for and won.

Who can sit nursing Gloom when bathed

in the green Fires of Phantasmagoria?

Think of it! Smile upon

my jagged Darlings, these ruptured Sweets

I lift up, fresh for your gazing!

You may think me a mere charcoal coolie,

yet I bear such beautiful Redundance!

I am its jubilant Negro,

its incandescent Indian;

I am muscled in pearwood,

draped in garnets and almandine,

I glisten with Fortitude!

I stand rinsed—yes!—with Joy,

a Holy Messenger buoyed

by a chorus of Hallelujahs,

all in praise of this Platter of Emeralds.

And so We are Yours now, Sire.

I will say it a thousand times

if I must—I can!—for I have

been waiting all my Life to step into

this Moment, your Moment,

arms full—

Yr. most

humble

obedient

exuberant

Servant,

As if music were a country,

he’d filled the biggest assembly rooms

on the busiest square of the capital city;

he’d played the best parties,

saw Beau Brummel blast protocol

with a single non-nod of his chin.

That had been during his concert season,

when everyone was buzzing;

he had owned the Pall Mall,

didn’t that count for something?

Music: Coach wheels slithering,

giggles jouncing the cream cups

brimming from milady’s bustier;

fear masked as delight. Music:

his Papa, his lost mother tongue.

Music: winds howling down

the four corridors of Fate

as he scrabbles after paper scraps,

tumbles the length of wherever he turned

getting longer, clutching air, crying out

(but soundlessly, a non-shout):

I played that once.

Haydn’s head has gone missing!

When Prince Antón the Magnificent

ordered the remains exhumed

from the Hundsthurm village graveyard

to the Mountain Church crypt at Eisenstadt,

one of the footmen stumbled;

the oaken lid shivered loose—

and only the wig fell out.

Caution? Goes without saying.

Caution was the least of it; one needs

luck and timing, heft and a whetted blade

plus a moon obscured by clouds or calendar

to make the witching hour ring true.

We’d done it once—shoveled fearfully,

past all endurance, only to find

removal of the head from its trunk

the most taxing. This time Jungmann brought

rope in a sack and Peter a bottle of wine

and I, Joseph Carl Rosenbaum,

former employee of the Esterházy princes,

now independent businessman,

music lover and amateur phrenologist,

paid off the gravedigger. All went smoothly,

yet I felt as though I had failed

once it tumbled—so light!—into my palms.

I was prepared for the smell.

Vomited, got on with it. Stowed the prize

in a pail, hidden under lap rugs

I had tucked in the carriage;

and for that one endless journey

cradled the reek, the dread stink

of my abomination.

III

Three days in lye had reduced the smell

but still we did not dare to open the shutters

even though it was the dead of night.

(Joking helped ease the nausea.)

Peter looked the very part of an avenging angel

in his white hospital gown, bone saw

held aloft to deliver last rites.

Unlike the actress whose wretched leavings

we’d practiced on last autumn (ten days gone,

a medical eternity), all here was intact

and uniformly green—like a huge rose-cabbage,

heroic on its stem.

Do not ask why,

for they would answer

“Science”—as if Science

were solely the desire

to know.

Materials used:

• one copper kettle

• three enamel pans

• sal ammoniac and lye (for debridement)

• spirit lamp

• spatula, trowels

• flat-nose pliers

• bone saw and a set of files

• calipers, gouges

• a good stomach

& a clear head.

We ordered a box with handles—

lacquered black, fringed,

with golden lyres on either end

and lined in white taffeta—

as snug a pillow for last dreams

as any Pharaoh’s. Maestro,

you would have understood.

You would not have faulted us

for using what you no longer needed.

VII

The Prince merely wished

his faithful Conductor returned

to be kept safe in death

as he was in life.

What’s wrong with that?

VIII

Preliminary examinations confirmed

the prediction of an expansive cranial cavity,

every bit as persuasive in its stripped state

as when arrayed in the jellied tissues of the living.

Vivisection lasted approximately one hour,

with no difficulties except in extraction

through the nasal passages. Finally,

success: a capacious, trilling cage.

Of the twenty-seven faculties

and their corresponding positions

on Gall’s phrenological map,

the protuberance for Kindness

was easily pinpointed. Also prodigious,

as expected, was the bump for Music.

Perseverance, Valour, and Circumspection

all boasted meaningful prominences

consistent with his humble assuredness,

the calm yet piercing quality of his gaze.

Come on: Ten years I’ve kept

proof of genius safe in a lacquer box,

and now I’m to give up my dearest trophy

on the strength of one sanctimonious aristocrat’s

whim for ceremony? Let him send his goons around.

I may be Suspect Number One, but there are latitudes

no man dare breach: When they come

I’ll have a sick wife lying abed behind doors

—fevered princess atop her precious pea!—

while I confess in exchange for ablution.

In their eyes, one skull’s as good as the next:

They’ll get an anonymous old bean,

just ripe for deification.

The great stone was unscrewed and a brass plate

inscribed with the venerable name

taken by the Provost of the Bergkirche

into the inner chamber. Two days later,

the crypt aired out, he returned

utterly alone to set the head

into its rightful berth.

The sexton helped screw the stone back in place.

Every church in Eisenstadt tolled its bells.

A gold-capped cane reached out

and tripped me.

I did not holler.

Children pointed, cackling like crows.

I did not whimper.

Birds whose names I never knew

in Polish, German, English—not even

the lingua franca of my beloved opera—

twirled merrily

in the tops of the plane trees.

My heart seized up but I did not flinch.

Except a man, once . . .

I must stop thinking

this . . . a man I loved,

who like a father loved me

in the only tongue

I could claim to understand,

split me like a capon,

ripped my life—my legacy!—in two

for the sake of what he refused

to call

A Cunt.

The birds persist with their untimely twitter.

He is deaf now, he hears nothing

of this fractured existence.

I would tell him (if he would see me)

there is no hero

who does not fall from grace;

I would whisper in his useless ear

This is the way of the world:

after the shout, a murmur;

after the murmur, a groan;

after the groan . . . ach,

worse than death

those

broken sounds.

He’s not here, son of a no-name minx, the air

is silenced. Puttied in place, secure, well lit,

the gate-mouthed raconteur holds court

whose birth and death were nothing more

than quick noise on a fiddle. Busker. Player

who’ll never get to see this lacquered likeness,

street ghost who gave no care beyond

the raining down of dull brown coin.

An urban tale, nothing new.

One more sour drop in the Thames

won’t stop the river’s muddy traffic;

a cursed life remains doomed even when

the fortunate find they miss those antics

which forced a blush or grin.

How else explain

this collector’s fantasy, a pantheon

gathered from niche and mantelpiece,

motley assembly of homespun Penates

unique to the common English household?

How else translate Billy’s military drag

into a gaudy clump of earthenware?

What’s left to say? He served

at sea, acquired a leg there, returned

and learned to scrape his catgut clean.

Got married, spawned two souls, clambered

up into the footlights for his fifteen

minutes, then fell into drink and debt;

was elected “King of the Beggars”

during his last ten days,

spent at St. Giles’ Workhouse.

He was forty-five. The rest

is shrouded in that profoundest

of neglects, the haze

of centuries.

Leavetaking

In search of pasture, a place to lie down in.

Back to the mother breast

or a dream of return

to the land of the fathers, a land my father

never mentioned, although he could pearl it out

in his impeccable German: Vaterland.

Fatherland, mothertongue.

I live, speak

elsewhere. This island.

St. Cloud, Paris

Strange name for a man of God. Stranger

this clipped, glazed landscape

which emerged from his modest

retreat: a man

who wished only to be

left alone—and was made

a saint for it, and brought back

into the fold. He kept vigil

here. Strange yet woefully apt then

this falling dream of water,

silver plunge and misted bursts,

swoon over swoon

tumbling

ecstatic, endless . . .

as slippery as

the apparition of multiplying selves

caught in the mirror-lined rooms where

I obliged the King’s morning toilette:

Clementi and Bach spilling

like perfume over the tossed silks,

valets tugging, murmuring over

his grunts as I kept fiddling,

tumbling smaller

and further

away . . .

if a saint couldn’t do it,

how could I?

Strangest of all, to imagine

the tattoo of boots crossing the parquet,

bayonet-flash clattering in the constant gleam

of the gilt tabouret, the stands of agate and polished marquetry.

That among these glittering bijoux

Republics were proclaimed,

and emperors . . .

where now a park lies

open to the ordinary citizen:

green terraces

for the parched wayfarer.

en route

Air, breathe me in. Take this thick

heartache, this wily, gelatinous yearning

and make me everywhere

a nothingness.

I will be

without boundaries, then;

an infestation of humors, invisible companion:

ageless, like a child.

No one will be able to avoid me.

Rome

I don’t know the name of the tree

which dandles here, nor of these blossoms’

impossible exuberance, how delicate how bold.

I should know these things.

I should walk more, sit in the sun.

Everyone here seems drunk from kissing.

Noon’s high light.

en route

What’s left for this palm to cradle,

these fingers to promenade?

My chin, what’s there for it to nudge into song;

and my chest—what about its shadow?

Dresden

Same drizzling encrustations of stone, same watery light

until darkness rolls in from the East like an army.

Sausages dangling from carts, nested in fists;

pale, stout faces fortified by the pledge to melt

once the lamps ignite in the beer halls . . .

Come to think of it, not a bad way

to dissolve the day.

The Channel

Back, back. But not

the beginning, not where

I started. That died with

Johann setting out

on the road. That died

when the only language I trusted

began to grow under my fingers

from the humming wood.

London

What am I looking for?

Why? I look and look, at people,

horses, even plants in the royal gardens at Kew—

I am tired of my eyes, I am tired of my ears,

my fingers itch for music but I am tired of

hearing it. Why not taste

then, or touch—that’s a good sense,

the Lilliputian topography of a lace handkerchief,

the cool slide of a marble hip . . .

There I go, buzzing around the edges of things,

never a person, never a heart I can feel

swelling in this lover’s chest, never skin. . . .

Once I felt I could walk a straight line

out of this city into the next

free world. But smell attacks

like a phalanx of grenadiers, so swiftly

from there to here to inside

and before you know it,

the citadel is lost.

Strolling

Real World, the one where everyone

exclaims how fortunate I am to have lived

amid such benign, beautiful people—weren’t they

wise and generous and kind, aren’t I grateful?

They were, they were, they were

and I am.

Along the Serpentine, Hyde Park

Violettengeruch:

a made-up word,

melancholy, blunt—

unlike its glib English cousin

scent-of-violets,

or the easy solace of refining

odeur to parfum;

yet none of these

—flippant, vulgar, smooth—

equal to the terror

a clutch of violets engenders

stumbled upon at dusk,

that panics the senses: so

sweet, so cold.

Not true, what the living claim we regret in the last hour:

no memories worth blubbering through, nor scrabbling for favor

in the eyes of our children, nor honor sought among friends.

Drool travels unnoticed from collar to pillow while, suspended

by blankets, a thigh dangles, blameless and bare.

Shame has lost its sting in this penultimate hell,

these next-to-last days when we’re still “ourselves.”

I don’t need wine or gossip or weather, I don’t give a fig

for warm socks or—don’t laugh—the summer’s first pear,

a fruit I haven’t been able to digest for twenty years

and have mourned for as long. What’s any of it

compared to this draining of humors, this wondrous uncaring?

Pain’s an interference; Love is cumbersome. For I loved only

what my fingers could do, and even they did not serve me

forever.