& his own answers in music that sounds like life.
“Stop being such a goddamned sissy!
Stand up for fine, strong music like this
& use your ears like a man!”
Berlioz Wins a Bride
“If she for one moment could conceive all the poetry, all the infinity of a like love, she would fly to my arms though she were to die in my embrace.”
—Hector Berlioz
Berlioz, the beautiful hawkman
fell in love with the Muse in the guise of Miss Smithson, the Irish actress—
poor Miss Smithson,
poor poor Miss Smithson.
Berlioz pined for her unrequitedly.
Berlioz raved for her Romantically.
Berlioz purple prosed her drunkenly through the suburban fields of Paris,
Chopin was concerned for him.
Berlioz saw her embrace her leading man on the stage—
oh fickle Muse, oh fickle fickle Muse!
Oh migraine Muse!
Berlioz ran from the theater weeping to pen his revenge on this black lady.
High as a spiraling hawk on opiated hash
Berlioz led her to the dock of Art
where the ragamuffin orchestra judged her:
catcalled its dissonant abuse
Whore! Slut! Scarlet woman!
While Berlioz,
self righteous impresario of the Fantastique,
acting as both conductor and executioner,
dark hair wild,
hawk eyes mad
started the march to the noose
with a juggle on the tympani
and ended it with the sweet snap of her importunate neck!
But poor Miss Smithson not being Muse cold or Muse true
being flesh and blood did yield to Hector’s rude nebulosities of love
and did marry him
and there did die in his embrace,
or worse yet turned into an Irish shrew
with an Irish obsession for the booze,
and around and around they went
in an accelerando
each with a silver plated pistol
making a witches’ Sabbath of the marriage.
He threw her scapula to the rats
hungry for the gory in the music;
she threw his Tuba Mirum to a goat dressed up as the Pope
snarling, “There’s your patron!
and here’s your Muse!”
Hitching up her skirts to the naked partita
doing a drunken bump and grind,
“Your inspiration, my music box!”
The two of them chopped up the instrument,
gutted the strings,
pulled out the keys like rotted teeth,
hacked off the gangrened pedals
then splintered the body
but the thing kept playing
and playing
its walpurgisnacht
its Totentanz
until she died in the variations.
Poor Miss Smithson,
poor poor Miss Smithson.
Let us imagine his Requiem is for her.
Musak
somewhere in the heartland of the nation, Kansas City say or maybe Omaha there is a secret underground installation in this concrete complex buried beneath the stockyards Musak is rendered from music take a song, any song with guts and balls the white smocked Musak technicians cut it open, sluice out the guts, extract the heroic, send the remnant to a few symposia on the meaning of “love” they pump the resulting comatose thing full of strings, attach a few angel wings, shoot it up with Hollow Man, then channel to an ad man composer or poet of hymns to sing to some king driven mad, centaur being flensed, flautist having donkey ears attached to his head or great weaver of Prometheans being turned into a spider
“I think that I shall never see a poem as beautiful as a tree” is how the power of Orpheus came out of the processing plant “pity this busy monster manunkind not” the liver of Prometheus after Musak processing “still falls the rain” the last string of the lyre used as a garrote “Oh, tannenbaum!” squeaks the tiny voice of Attis from inside the tree
lobotomized Eurydice genderless upbeat schlock Semele so you boogaloo down the aisle not noticing what demon you’re buying as you’re shopping 101 Strings Does the Dismemberment soothes you into missing the earthquake rising from the casket beneath Kobe
kill them kill all the songs
or at the dentist’s having a root canal done on your resistance to aliens by the angels humming Mysterious Mountain
kill all the songs!
or in the church where they put you to sleep with A Mighty Fortress so they can insert Le Sacre du Printemps up your Twentieth Century
kill all the songs!
or on the psych ward taking your pill of Amahl so you can still give your gifts to the Kings
kill all the songs! kill the poor things!
the hawks with one wing!
give them the lead gift
they’re not responsible
and did you know they have Spartacus arranged for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir? while Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony sings in its chains for Rogaine?
kill all the songs!
give them the lead gift in the twilight
kill the poor things!
kill all the songs!
Listening to Music
in the evening I drink wine and listen to music
To Copland
Appalachian Spring
“tis a gift to be simple” cranked up loud enough
so the rocks to hear it
Billy the Kid
bad and proud of it
broke and entered the Muses’ Bank
made off with the Genesis account
Shostakovich
the Tenth to keep Stalin dead
Vaughn Williams’ Antarctic Symphony
“to forgive wrongs darker than night or death
to suffer woes hope thinks infinite”
and sing it!
not like chains
but like spring!
like, it is not cold here!
it may be cold where you are
shivering in your poetry prisons
but it is not cold here!
it is not cold where I have raised
Prometheus from the bottom of Lake Nancy
I refuse to freeze
beneath a blanket of meekness
in front of a dead fireplace at some church
with the Id Monster chained in the basement
it is before in The Beginning here
when it was good
before Time with his scythe
created that weeping wound
covered by a big popple leaf
I will not repent my life
I will not forget my wife
that I father things
that I have spoken to all the kings
who harden their hearts when Orpheus sings
it is cold on the golf course
where you hide down in Florida!
in Harpers where the poem shi
vers on the page
pawing desperately through Emily Dickinson’s under things
searching for a body
trying to build a fire
in the frozen slush pile
after a while the dog in your manger
waiting for a fire builder
will get up
trot off through the woods
toward the source of this music
the real spring
Wagner
Wagner, Mr. Marvel, decided to become a composer
before he could play a single note
so you know he had gall,
balls
with a capital “B.”
It must have been playing that angel as a child that did it.
Wagner lived off “impressionable” women for a while
while his creditors plagued him like veritable Walkuries—
he owes them an inspirational debt.
Early on Wagner, like Napoleon, crowned himself
Official Musical Mutant and Composer of the Future.
It was all just in fun, of course
to play Superman,
steal other men’s wives
while the queer King of Bavaria
kept you in silks, blank checks
villas and Festspielhaus
so you could fiddle with the Mythos
the dead serious ostinati in the blood,
Schopenhauer’s “proto images of the world”
and not laugh when Berlioz quipped
“Yes, Richard, but in Paris we call that digestion, letting a little wind.”
But the polemics against the Jews
the Aryan hysterics,
the forever Flying Dutchman of your hate
were not “farting,” Richard.
As for the Siegfried
we were all spellbound
by the acid trip swastikas in its eyes
before Brunnhilde could destroy the place.
Karen Kraco
Stuck
Infidelity
For the months you’ve carried this
you’ve had the wild look of a man
who’s been ordered to drive a cab
in a city he doesn’t know.
You keep turning: right, right again
but then wrong, wrong, wrong
forgetting to remember that if only you’d ask
I’d show you the map: you might find your way home.
Impasse
A mountain fills the room
and neither of us understands the why
of moving it. Wall-to-wall silence
windows black doors jammed
cut off from the cities
that twinkle in its valleys.
Irreconcilable
I weep for the speck of the egg
that might have become feathers and cluck
but still can relish the omelet. You, you
crack the shell, see bright red, and swear
off eating eggs for months.
Steaming meals now cold
company no longer invited
silence seated
in the place
of grace.
Postcard Poems: Animal Attitude
Bull
You stick your finger in a can of tuna
then insist the orange cat likes you
for who you are—as flimsy as the red silk cape
you flash in front of your black lab
so proud of your posture
as you call in the picadors!
You knew I was watching
as you dressed down your duck—
webbed footprints up and down
the stairs, across the kitchen floor.
Prairie Dog
Your first line of defense—
go underground. You burrow deep
digging a tangle of tunnels
so that at each choice of paths
I wonder where you’ve gone.
Once, I did catch up, and instead
of turning to face me, you sat back
on your haunches, blocking the passage,
your arguments lost to me
in the hollowness ahead.
You’ll pop up again, I know,
but you won’t find me
waiting at your hole.
Roadrunner
How much farther
can you stretch your stress?
Take your taut chicken-neck pulse
then chill. Yesterday, you looked
over your shoulder, ran
without choosing to run
and when you stopped short
no one, not even you, knew.
Whale
What remains unseen
haunts us more
than that flash of black fin
as the water parts.
You surface only
to slip out of my hands
when you sink so deep
that it’s too risky to follow.
Watch that bobber drown,
then spring up, wobbling wildly
when it loses the life
to which it’s tethered.
Jackalope
You photoshop an effigy of yourself
onto places you’d like to visit
send postcards from everywhere
except where you’ve been
use some other number
to call the people you love.
When I finally trace you
a total stranger answers, asks
How’s he been?
Rough Dreams
Just when you thought it was safe, the cat
in the corner bats rattlesnakes across the room,
and your parakeet, free, sings off-key.
The man for whom you’ve secretly longed
moves closer, strokes your cheek, and nyuk, nyuk, nyuks
like one of the Three Stooges. Get up.
What’s that banging at the door?
A neighbor, with an invitation for your goat.
Main course, his mother-in-law’s windshield wiper blades.
While you negotiate who will be responsible
for the hoofprints on the hood—you, him, or the goat—
the phone rings.
It’s your brother, dead two years today,
wondering what you’re going to do
with the clothes still hanging
in the closet: a brown tweed jacket,
his two favorite shirts.
Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill
The last remaining Shaker at Pleasant Hill,
Sister Mary Settles, died in 1923.
One baritone sows overtones
of every register.
Brothers here.
Sisters there.
Simple Gifts
word for word
note for note
a’s and o’s shaped true
to the way they sang them.
He stamps their beat back
into the original floorboards.
Steps toward us with open arms,
broadcasting the smile of every Shaker
who ever danced in this hall.
Nods greetings to each guest on each bench
as he walks down the aisle, singing verses
in rhythm that works on us, row by row.
One by one we offer shy, tight smiles.
A woman in front moans along, monotone.
The couple beside me sways from side to side.
/> Costume. His rough woven vest is costume, I say,
but I watch two Shakers take his outstretched hands,
then two more, theirs, until the hundreds who we’re told
circled and whirled in this empty room grab hands, winding
their way around until we either find ourselves against the wall
or choose to join in.
My foot begins to tap,
longing to belong to this larger thunder.
Three miles away, a farmer lifts his head.
Rafael Miguel Montes
Gas Mask
She’s asked me to clean up again.
Asked me to vacuum and dust and mop and,
time permitting,
pull the matted hair stuck to the toilet.
Stiffbrush the mold in the shower stall.
She’s asked me this hundreds of Sundays in a row.
As if I might forget.
Perhaps even one day rebel.
I want to damn the toilet all to hell,
make the shower unfit for humans or dogs.
Watch the tiles get black and yellow,
as mold and piss fight for control.
I want this house to smell like a rodeo latrine.
I want my cats stumbling around towers of yellow papers,
torn magazines held up by house corners.
See their furry bodies tangle with bags and bags of Fritos,
a cardboard fort of old pizza boxes,
other cats—caught and killed by my walls of garbage.
I need a team of men in gasmasks gasping “Shit!”
and a tiny woman, in an unthreatening cream suit,
talking about anxiety and “letting go.”
Want to have my children crying and screaming,
tell me about a “special” home they plan for me to go,
and how this is the last time and giving up.
Have the youngest one feel guilted into helping.
I want to forget the hair and the dust and the smell,
those things returning every Sunday for me.
I just want to write this poem, now.
I want to clean myself first.
Broom
In just five quick nights, the cinnamon broom
you nailed to the bedroom door
stopped working.
After that excited first unwrap,
we were certain Christmas had come to town.
It was mid-August and we thought we heard carolers.