Devils & Islands. Turner Cassity

harpsichord sounds like two skeletons copulating.

      —Sir Thomas Beecham

      The practice keyboard teaches only fingering.

      Interpretation is beyond it. Lacking sound,

      It will forgive wrong notes, not know an exercise

      From Bach, if there indeed is some distinction. Mute,

      It is the ideal medium for twelve-tone works,

      If not the Chopin repertoire. Without response,

      How judge of touch? Too firm? Too light? One must assume

      Seducers learn and necrophiliacs do not,

      Else why do spinet’s key and quill go at it so?

      Is Czerny a perversion? And if harpsichords

      Seem musical cadavers, are the fringe who play

      “Authentic instruments” grave robbers? They, in proof

      Of scholarship as folly, preach that out-of-tune

      Is what is called for. Vocal exercises—scales—

      Employ an instrument whose authenticity

      No one can doubt. A vocalise may have no words,

      But is expression in a way dexterity,

      Viewed, cannot ever be, although Franz Liszt might say

      “My fingering could surely semaphore the deaf,

      Who at recitals should be charged full ticket price.”

      To speak of heartstrings being plucked is retrograde,

      As to both time and mechanism. Live hearts hammer.

      Before Clocks Were Digital

      Tonguing the brushes as they line a phosphorescent paint

      Upon the dials that are piecework of their day,

      The girls who presently will harbor cancer in the jaw

      And die of it in more than one sense Time destroys.

      In most of us a radium does not accumulate.

      The numerals, however, do. They sum to what,

      Subtracted by its twin the midnight hour, is nought indeed:

      Zero of a departed beat, a darkened face.

      As radium decays it goes to half-life, interim

      Which we are not permitted. Half-life is for us

      The half we call a coma. Greenish numerals that light

      Insomnia, the hands that track it, are, dispersed

      In time, the ghosts of those who painted them, or at the least

      Their fit memorials—of application, tongue,

      And talent, faint but glowing, form: the minute’s trace prolonged

      Beyond the minute, time-specific and yet more.

      After the Fall

      Created out of five-and-dimes,

      The Woolworth sums up better times:

      A Flemish Gothic 1910

      Metropolis that might have been;

      As, wholly 1932,

      The Empire State, forever new,

      Foretells a city so far seen

      In drawings only, caught between

      Prospectus and a backward glance

      Toward Babylon. As we advance

      The future takes on, more and more,

      A look of follies gone before.

      On every planner’s mounting zeal

      Hell’s Kitchen comes to put its seal,

      And where the streets of Haussmann go

      Stood once the Walls of Jericho.

      Above the airship mooring mast

      The TV aerials broadcast,

      Confirming that Count Zeppelin

      Is where our Captain Kirks begin.

      In fiction—pulp or subtler art—

      In film, the silents at the start

      And talkies after, Emerald

      Or seven-gated, tightly walled

      Yet welcoming, a citadel

      No actuality can quell,

      Our future is that city, myth

      We are from childhood encumbered with.

       Amazonas.com

      Outside Manaus, not to disappoint the tours,

      A number of the locals have obligingly

      Gone native, hunter-gatherers in those locales

      Not being numerous before the rubber boom

      Annihilated all of them. The derelicts

      In urban jungles stateside lack so safe a choice.

      Feathers and piercings, body paint on them would seem

      Survivals of the ’60s, and increase dislike

      That they incur, already great. Earrings are threats?

      A naked savage is a homeless person, nude?

      Curare is a savage’s designer drug,

      His head shop all too unequivocally that,

      And any medicine of his, Alternative.

      Headhunter, herbalist, ex-hippie growing old,

      Have you as tourist trap, asylum, dead-end street

      A jungle placable as this? All of your past

      Tamed? Going native in its time was not PC.

      It was admitting failure, just as, now, it’s seen

      As saving wildlife with a nose flute. Music puts

      Also its spin on histories of peonage

      In rubber gathering, an expiation based

      On the offending firms’ elitist theory

      Goodyear will always be what makes the world go round,

      And no town with an opera house can be all bad.

      Erich Wolfgang Korngold

       1897–1957

      The perfect hero, perfect plot,

      I did not live to score.

      That would have meant, as like as not,

      Techniques I used before,

      But barer. Fewer upward sweeps

      Among the strings; no harps;

      Fanfares, but diatonic; leaps

      Of key from flats to sharps

      Avoided, save where, as with change

      Of focus, they explain.

      You cannot treat the Texas Range

      And soundstage Spanish Main

      In one tonality. But who

      For hero, what the script?