A Drop Away
Part II

With waxing light the day waned, and
the sun impeached the last of it.
Through shadow bands, through slanting light
we wove the city in and out.

Hotel Ivy has climbed
to the out-flung low sky
and is putting forth leaves
in the city’s long eaves;
and the older hotels
and the steam are ascending
with the venerable motion
of cracked brick and lotion;
and the Wells Fargo Cen-
ter begins in maroon
and it shoots out of sight
looming into the night;
south again under the
double sky way between
Gaviidae I & II
with extravagant view;
to the Metrodome, ho,
and on Washington north,
over wide water span
where dark melted snow ran.

Curving a round at last we rose
lifted before seven hundred lofts;
we shared the height of the sun, bright disk:
the core on the edge of the world.

Jay Nordlinger reviews music for the New Criterion. I read him, and it seems to me his style is passing informal, even quirky. He has a great deal of confidence to pull off music reviews the way he does, and I sometimes wonder whether it is really his judgment and not his cleverness which is on display. Perhaps reliable music critics are hard to come by. It led me to wonder if I should not send a letter to the editors:

Dear Messrs Kimball & Kramer,

As a subscriber to your august and reputable magazine, I have been surprised to read the columns submitted by Mr. Nordlinger in recent issues. I confess I find them exceedingly informal and even quirky, and I wonder why this is. He is a clever chap, no doubt, and can obviously turn a clever phrase or impart to us things he has found funny without circumlocution. His prose is not seldom irreverent—which I can handle, but it is occasionally precious—which I cannot.

Yes, precious. I am sorry to have to resort to such terms, but that is the truth of it.

I have been practicing my accordion for nearly a year and have worked my way clean through Mel-Bay’s book, and I have attended concerts here and there of various instruments including, from time to time, full-blown orchestras with the guy in front that gesticulates wildly. I am also a great fan of P.D.Q. Bach. My father, I understand, once played in a band and spat into a jug to great acclaim. I had a piano teacher, even, for a while, and with the aid of a dictionary could probably throw out some pretty fancy musical terms, should the need arise. If you are looking for somebody to help you with your music reviews, I am willing to consider doing it. I would be happy to accept payment per piece and also all expenses while on assignment (I would have to fly to New York, London and Tel Aviv pretty regularly, I think).

I remain cordially yours,

* * *

I did actually attend a concert on Friday evening. It was the last of the Minnesota Bach Society’s three concert series for this year. They have a new director, Paul Boehnke who is most accomplished. He played the harpsichord to my acclaim and all the folks assembled. They also made use of a pleasing baritone named Bradley Greenwald who is capable and game. Greenwald was one of the bright points in an otherwise mediocre performance of Bach’s St. John’s Passion I lived through the previous Friday evening. (This makes two concerts in two weeks, which I might have to add to my list of qualification above.) He did not disappoint, either as Pilate or in any other piece he intoned. In the larger space for the St. John’s Passion he used his voice better than any of the other soloists could, even from up in the loft to which he ascended several times during the course of the performance. In the smaller space at House of Hope for the Bach Society, and especially in duet with Carrie Henneman Shaw, he was even better. I hope I can attend many of his performances.

A Drop Away

Part I
pour la petite Raquel, brillant

The snow’s invasion had been spent
The clouds dispersed, vanquished away
like broken bread reduced to crumbs
blue skies through rifts appeared at last;
and after six o’clock we saw the sun.

It shone on Minneapolis
of glass, of towers ranked and bright,
a crop and shock of light. The corn
of winter’s summer’s prairie yield;
and still the cold impinges on our minds.

The mountains rise to mountain sky
though mountain skies are not like ours;
here skies are far more mutable
and swept with long north winds; and calm
the city rests immutable below.

The wind runs through alive, unchecked,
like all the rampant plows that range
to make aborted mine shafts in
the streets of Minneapolis;
on these we went in shadow long, in light.

The Immemorial Blood
for Todd who was a cop and now’s a pastor and must leave Minneapolis eftsoons

We shouted our remarks—
Brahms loud inside the car
to Minneapolis
returning like the blood
returning to the heart.

Heifetz at times would miss
his pitch, acutely; then
we shouted over him
things unremembered now
and hurtled through the night,
past backward-shooting fleet
white stripes and trails of glo-
wing tail lights; soaring Brahms
would falter and would ache.

A tunnel’s at the heart
of Minneapolis—
a tunnel for traffic
to pass between opening
walls of science-fiction,
allowing cars an exit
invisible behind
a long, unvaulted turn;
and Heifetz lays it out:
effortless trilling and
a brash sound bowing like
steel wire to tow the world
away out of orbit.

And all the ligaments
of life are spun out of
scraping strings. The systole-
diastole beating heart
of Minneapolis,
its pulse, is measured in
the pause before the curve:
south-bound within,
north-bound without.

That tunnel-heart shoots forth
arterial flow of blood
red tail light cells in the
darkness with the thunder
orchestral: a flowing roar,
a swoop and rush away, away
from Minneapolis.

My wife and I we shouted at each other over the Brahms blaring and sped toward the heart of Minneapolis. Heifetz did not always find his pitch, acutely; so we shouted at each other about things I don’t remember and hurtled through the night, past backward shooting fleet white stripes and trails of glowing tail lights while Brahms soared and faltered with panache.

The heart of Minneapolis is a tunnel through which traffic passes without provocation, past smooth science-fiction walls widening to allow the car into an opening invisible behind the turn; and Heifetz laying it out, trilling effortless and bowing brash with a sound like the steel wire used to tow the world out of its orbit. And all the ligaments of life are spun out of scraped strings. The systole and diastole of the heart of Minneapolis, its pulse is measured in the pause before the curve: southbound within, northbound without. That tunnel-heart shoots out the arterial flow of blood red tail light cells into the darkness with the thundering of orchestral triumph, a roaring swoop and rush away.

And then the snow relented, and the clouds began to break asunder, and the blue skies were seen at last. And after six o’clock the sun shone on the glass towers of Minneapolis, and the streets were clear, and cold began impinging on our consciousness. I love the mountains but the mountain skies are not the mid-western skies so mutable and swept with long, northern winds under which the gleaming and growing city of Minneapolis rests like the crown of the prairies. The wind runs through unchecked, like the rampant plows that have not been kind to the streets of Minneapolis. Aborted mine shafts gape at regular intervals in the more recondite portions of the broad downtown streets. We wove in and out of the city in the last of the daylight, before sunset impeached the day, down by the new Hotel Ivy, up by the older hotels and the steam, down past the glorious Wells Fargo Center, the first two feet of it maroon and no more, up again under the double skyway between Gaviidae I & II and around the metrodome to return the way of Washington and then over the bridge by the Carlisle, not much older than the young, open but still unfinished Hotel Ivy.

Rising on the ramp past the 700 lofts we were the same height as the sun’s bright disk on the edge of the world. The clouds were mostly dispersed so that the clear skies can allow another reminder of the winter’s ice to seize the nooks and crannies of Minneapolis one more night.

But the water is running away, rushing into the night and the sun will greet it swelling in the south where it will make its way out to the fish of the gulf of Mexico and eventually to Ireland and the British Isles, the Faroes and Iceland too. And perhaps the precipitation of Minneapolis that splashed out of a pothole and into the sewers and down to the Mississippi winding further toward warm weather, brown and troubled, into the Atlantic and then warmed and curving north again will surface and blow over the rocks of the North Atlantic and wash them, and wash their mystical sheep and their long, green grasses and land on the spectacles of some Scot in the Shetlands, some Shetlander out for a walk with a stick and a good woolen sweater, and he will look through the drop on his lens and see for a moment the proud, glass buildings of a wondrous city crowning the prairie half a world away.

We have a parked plow in our parking lot and it snowed all day and the plow never moved. It started snowing Friday morning and the plow does not appear to have been moved since February. So at the end of it, more or less, I contemplate this and offer you a poem that might have been entitled the Naked Plow as the name seemed more poetic, but is not as the one it has is more to the point. It has the value of offering, if not timelessness, at least a near approximation in the monolithic impassivity of said plow. Needless to say, in this offering I have pretty much reached the zenith of my powers.

Parked Plow

All day it snowed
After it snowed all night,
And with the dawn
Snow huddled on the cars.
Till afternoon
The thin snow fell like rain,
And when it thawed
And water chattered free,
It still came down
Snow—melting on impact.

A truck sits parked
With a red plow attached.
The huddled snow
Is melted almost clear
Away. It sits
In the apartment lots
Taking a space
So mine is more remote;
And I walk back
Through falling snow, like rain.

One of the elements came with the cold wind: the clouded sky. The clouds seemed pretty high; as darkness fell the planes approached the airport under them, their lights low on the horizon, approaching like mosquitoes. I once saw, while driving in Wisconsin, a pair of F-16s drop out of the sky abruptly and fall below the trees in one incredible swoop with more descent than forward motion—so it appeared when I glanced at them. But my mosquito planes all spraddled with their large, tube bodies and the awkward engines on long wings and little clutching wheels grip the runway like clumsy children and require plenty of room for forward motion. But the arrival was not an element of this evening, save that they hovered in the distance anticipating it, five or six crowding low on the western sky.
(more…)

I have begun affecting an old British Airways bag. It is vintage, man; I got it from my mom. In it I put my lunch and my gregg ruled notepad, some tonic water every so often and perhaps a book. But it was missing something.

It has a front pocket, you see, a front pocket indeed, for a book, a newspaper or something just wedged. But wedging a book that is more than just thin would be awkward and tight and would do the bag in. So I pondered and thought and with much meditation I have found out some things that will prove a solution. I went down to uptown and into a store, where one can find poetry wedged near the door. I found me some Heaney and Logan and Spires, their spines very narrow like three slender towers. So now I can put them in the pocket you see, and stretch out the meter but not my dear bag, and have them all handy should I find myself in some situation that requires waiting, which, I must admit, I certainly hope comes soon.

I was rather pleased to walk into one place and find not only Heaney but even Logan and Spires. They are not easy to come by. The other one I’m collecting is David Jones.

Sousa’s march is a fine thing for an accordion, just difficult. The difficulty lies in all the key changes because you have to shift your left hand around too much. I’ve been practicing at this one since I finished Mel-Bay since I reckin I know everything there is to know about accordion. I could go on with the Palmer-Hughes book 3, which would be more gradual, but I get depressed playing out of a book with dumb pictures in it.

So I have been practicing the Stars & Stripes for two months straight without really getting it down and sometimes it gets to me.

* * *

Especially today when I thought I had a bona fide nitwit on my hands over at Remonstrans, and it turns out the guy is putting it on and getting tired of it. I should have known nobody could have all those serial contradictions without actually trying to do it. Rats! Especially when I had a good one about why I had not read Hegel.

Well, I had two good ones about not reading Hegel. I’ll share them here but it won’t be as much fun.

1 One was going to be that they did not have any Hegel at the library of my alma mater. Of course, I might have just been lazy and not noticed that they had Hegel, but there is a good chance they had no Hegel. I remember the sources for that paper: the Encyclopedia Britannica Macropaedia, the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, and Sir Francis Schaeffer. Which is pretty exhaustive, and I was clean wore out after all that research. I was hoping this one would let me comment on how the librarians back then were not so draconian either and as a result the cool people made it impossible to study.

That would have been great, but I think number two would probably have been the single funniest thing I ever posted on the internet.

2 The second was was that it was too boring, that I had given up on Kant because he was so boring (which was true) and then had tried Hegel. But Hegel was so boring I went to sleep and so I fell off the toilet and almost cracked my head open so I had to give up on that also.

But I probably got that joke from somewhere else. Still, I’m kind of mad at exlibris for breaking it all up, although I probably ought to be glad since I really thought he was as dumb as some others and only more perky.

The sun is beamish bright, my lads, when it is shining on the glass, reflected back and streaming through.

So does the light split? Is there an economics to the trail of light? When the light falls radiant on the top of the Wells Fargo Center, that most beautiful, proud building, does part of it stream in the windows to fall on the inside and part of it get reflected back? I would like to think it is not something that can be calculated, but only that it is something people imagine they can calculate but really can’t because when they try they fail to take everything into consideration like the light returning out the window and mingling with the light reflected dazzling. I would like to think something so dazzling would be boundless, outside of the scope of the pernicious measurements of those economists, sophists and calculators of their own unwitting participations.

* * *

I sat in a class looking out the window and across the city to where a socialist-looking building squatted under the clouds. On top a flag flew in the wind, surmounting all. And then after a while the sun came out and the flag flew in the wind and in the sunlight too, more bright, free and proud surmounting all and indifferent above all the collectivists and calculators, sophists, economists and frauds below.

* * *

Driving home in the dark I remembered when I was a kid, sitting in the back of a car or jeep or van and watching the light from the lamps enter and then leave the car like breathing or a heartbeat. We were not late people, in my family, and this was seldom, and after a long day, and I was weary, and there was something indescribable about the passing bands of light, the swift ensuing darkness, the unending alternation. It was a hint of monotony but also a hint of eternity, a sort of spinning caused by being borne on spinning wheels over the road.