It is a sort of harmonious murmur, rather than musick, and in a time when people lived in tranquillity and at ease, the entertainment of it was agreeable, not unlike a confused singing of birds in a grove. – Roger North, IN NOMINES
This Bessemer converter has been tuned to 440 A
and all of the birds are electric, low-voltage, humming
residuals in a forest of hurt trees.
Nothing is unclear. It is as plain as soldiers
drilled in their zebra stripes into exactness.
And the helpless elderly critic awash
in his armchair crossing the English Channel sinks
as so many have sunk before him, muttering only
“Play on, damn you, play on!”
Liberace zapped by attendant sprites, Sinatra
in the smelliest bobby-sox since the Paleozoic
and Youth wearing liver, with safety-pins through its
nipples.
I am only a wanderer here; I am not in charge.
It must have started thus: one troglodyte playing
riffs on an old skull, and his aunt by marriage,
though not her marriage, saying “Sir Henry Wood
and the Promenade Concerts are the only hope.”
Down through the ages: the Mass of the Armed Man,
Mozart and Salieri with the poisoned scores.
How has it never been willing to be gentle?
The conductor like a tiger with his baton.
If we sought out together an harmonious murmur,
walking, hand in hand, through the man-eating cadenzas,
do you think we would come there, agreeable and confused,
pleasant to have breakfast with, inhabitants
of a grove without dissonance or confrontation?
Where dryads meditate at their single flutes?
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