For David Kalstone
A gray maidservant lets me in
To Mrs Livingston’s box. It’s already begun!
The box is full of grown-ups. She sits me down
Beside her. Meanwhile a ravishing din
Swells from below–Scene I
Of Das Rheingold. The entire proscenium
Is covered with a rippling azure scrim.
The three sopranos dart hither and yon
On invisible strings. Cold lights
Cling to bare arms, fair tresses. Flat
And natural aglitter like paillettes
Upon the great green sonorous depths float
Until with pulsing wealth the house is filled,
No one believing, everybody thrilled.
Lives of Great Composers make it sound
Too much like cooking: “Sore beset,
He put his heart’s blood into that quintet …”
So let us try the figure turned around
As in some Lives of Obscure Listeners:
“The strains of Cimarosa and Mozart
Flowed through his veins, and fed his solitary heart.
Long beyond adolescence (One infers
Your elimination, sweet Champagne
Drunk between acts!) the aria’s remote
Control surviving his worst interval,
Tissue of sound and tissue of the brain
Would coalesce, and what the Masters wrote
Itself compose his features sharp and small.”
Hilariously Dr Scherer took the guise
Of a bland smoothshaven Alberich whose age-old
Plan had been to fill my tooth with gold.
Another whiff of laughing gas,
And the understanding was implicit
That we must guard each other, this gold and I,
Against amalgamation by
The elemental pit.
Vague as to what dentist and tooth ‘stood for,’
One patient dreamer gathered something more.
A voice said in the speech of birds,
“My father having tampered with your mouth,
From now on, metal, music, myth
Will seem to taint its words.”
We love the good, said Plato? He was wrong.
We love as well the wicked and the weak.
Flesh hugs its shaved plush. Twenty-four hour long
Galas fill the hulk of the Comique.
Flesh knows by now what dishes to avoid,
Tries not to brood on bomb or heart attack.
Anatomy is destiny, said Freud.
Soul is the brilliant hypochondriac.
Soul will cough blood and sing, and softer sing,
Drink poison, breathe her joyous last, a waltz
Rubato from his arms who sobs and stays
Behind, death after death, who fairly melts
Watching her turn from him, restored, to fling
Kisses into the furnace roaring praise.
The fallen cake, the risen price of meat,
Staircase run ten times up and down like scales
(Greek proverb: He who has no brain has feet)
One’s household opera never palls or fails.
The pipes’ aubade. Recitatives.-Come back!
-I’m out of pills!—We’d love to!—What?—Nothing.
Let me be !—No, no, I’ll drink it black …
The neighbors’ chorus. The quick darkening
In which a prostrate figure must inquire
With every earmark of its being meant
Why God in Heaven harries him/her so.
The love scene (often cut). The potion. The tableau:
Sleepers folded in a magic fire,
Tongues flickering up from humdrum incident.
When Jan Kiepura sang His Handsomeness
Of Mantua those high airs light as lust
Attuned one’s bare throat to the dagger-thrust.
Living for them would have been death no less.
Or Lehmann’s Marschallin!-heartbreak so shrewd,
So ostrich-plumed, one ached to disengage
Oneself from a last love, at center stage,
To the beloved’s dazzled gratitude.
What havoc certain Saturday afternoons
Wrought upon a bright young person’s morals
I now leave to the public to condemn.
The point thereafter was to arrange for one’s
Own chills and fever, passions and betrayals,
Chiefly in order to make song of them.
You and I, caro, seldom
Risk the real thing any more.
It’s all too silly or too solemn.
Enough to know the score
From records or transcription
For our four hands. Old beauties, some
In advanced stages of decomposition,
Float up through the sustaining
Pedal’s black and fluid medium.
Days like today
Even recur (wind whistling themes
From Lulu, and sun shining
On the rough Sound) when it seems
Kinder to remember than to play.
Dear Mrs Livingston,
I want to say that I am still in a daze
From yesterday afternoon.
I will treasure the experience always
My very first Grand Opera! It was very
Thoughtful of you to invite
Me and am so sorry
That I was late, and for my coughing fit.
I play my record of the Overture
Over and over. I pretend
I am still sitting in the theatre.
I also wrote a poem which my Mother
Says I should copy out and send.
Ever gratefully, Your little friend …
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