(Composed as a fantasia in verse on the thirty-two songs of Fiona Apple, and conceived as a tribute to their author.)
- for Heather -
I.
Extraordinary things, I once was told,
are fashioned of the mundane.
I wake to die and I die to sleep
and I sleep to dream. It is plain!
Yes, my ordinary life has been
an ordinary disaster.
Does this explain my extra intentions
for things made out of plaster?
Plaster: my latest trope for song.
I can hear my judges, my panel.
They escort me back to my old machine,
my zebra-striped piano –
the altar at which some pilgrim in me
gets down on her hands and knees.
Who summons my fingers to rid their angst
on these eighty-seven keys?
Muses, ladies, sisters, come on!
Can you lend me some wand or fairy
to help me in shoving the extra back
into this ordinary?
* * *
Pearls are the Diver’s farthings, said Emily,
extorted from the Sea.
I’m sure she wrote a poem or two
of the pearls that were taken from me!
God made a Clam – Life took the Pearl –
And it left behind a sullen Girl –
Or, Neptune admired a tender Whorl –
He left her Shell and took her Pearl –
Or maybe my fingers compare to T. S.
Eliot’s ragged claws.
They scuttle across the silent seas
to the waves’ unflagging applause.
Song is memory’s reenactment
of voices that have been stolen.
The idea’s to make their silence pure;
instead, they call me sullen.
Yes, my song is an imprint of the time
when love in me did abound.
Now emptiness is my abundance and
my abundance is my sound.
Quavers drift into the shell like pearls.
I play them to get rid of them.
Decrescendo. Thus I seek
an emptier, bluer oblivion.
* * *
A philosophy prof explained to me
about the Platonic forms.
They’re arrayed on a heaven within the mind,
immune from human storms.
Love is the foremost, so Plato said,
of the shadows with which we box.
It grants us entry into each other.
It also gives us the pox.
Occasionally it condescends
to appear within another.
If you spy it emerging tipped in flame,
you’d better run for cover.
I envy the gods in Homer’s world,
upon their Elysian meadows.
They sing without needing to earn their pay.
Nor do they box with shadows.
II.
The Golden Age fell with one event –
the Hesperian Apple Heist.
Antiquity’s over. Now we’re in
the extended Era of Christ.
I ready for a night of song
from my suite atop the Marriott –
not so much Fiona Icarus
as Fiona Iscariot.
You’ll read it closely intimated
between the staves of my hymnal:
Mythology blames Hercules,
though I myself am the criminal.
The songs and poems of this fallen age
are the pearls of the sinned against.
But I, as sinnee and sinner both,
am the one to be consequenced.
The key is to find that place in sound
where the errors are sanded and seamed.
The piano’s the box at which I hawk
these apples to be redeemed.
Some bastard of Cupid, bedecked in flames,
now emerges from my dream.
I’ll tap his viscous love, and he mine,
and we’ll flow like honey and cream.
Afterwards we’ll wipe up the mess
to ensure our mutual hygiene.
And I’ll write a song of yet one more ass
whose heart would not oblige him.
My meters will haunt him like a curse,
and my modes will insinuate.
My descant will tell of his destiny,
and my cadence of his fate.
He’s trounced in the end by my rubato.
Too quickly he overflows.
His cream coagulates on his spout.
My honey both quickens and slows.
And my phoenix, from this melody’s pyre,
will rise up to her glory.
Fiona by then may be dead and gone…
but that’s another story!
* * *
Each time it’s a mock imitation of
the very first scene of love:
a man, a rib, a woman, a kiss,
an apple, then push comes to shove.
Eve enjoys her first nibble of Adam,
and Adam his first of Eve.
Then together they chomp on an apple,
causing their issue to grieve.
Yes, everyone’s known for eons now
that the very first sin was mine;
you’ll find it in Genesis, Chapter 3
(and Paradise Lost, Book IX).
But no one ever mentions the fact
that this goddamn story’s a hoax,
that I traveled unspied from west to east
by constantly shifting cloaks,
that Hercules merely helped me convey
the tree to Edenic soil.
We needed each other. I don’t believe
I repaid him for his toil.
Before the fall of the Golden Age,
my fate was to live forever.
Later, assuming the role of Eve,
I learned of “ever” and “never.”
In immortal climates, such concepts as these
rarely make any sense.
Time is a vast continuum, and
there’s little discernment of tense.
“I’ll ever do this, I’ll never do that…”
Humans enjoy such phrases.
Immortals use them to knock each other
out of their proper phases.
Godhead, so it seemed to me then,
was a chain of broken promises.
That is why I left my post
to seek life with the higher hominids.
So I smuggled out of Iberia
the apples upon their tree.
It wasn’t my plan to get tangled up
in human maternity.
As Eve, my time was bound to expire,
so I wandered from girl to girl.
By now I’ve a thousand-odd tales to tell
of many a stolen pearl.
Infancy lasts but a day or two;
of a sudden, the child is gone.
I catch my breath each time just to learn
that I’ve chosen a fallen pawn.
I’ve often wondered how my sisters
reacted when I departed.
There wasn’t time to think of them
the minute that Genesis started.
My destiny became entwined
with the one who was fashioned of clay.
This wasn’t at all what I’d had in mind;
I wasn’t inclined to stay.
But my apples were forbidden me;
I was locked in this other tale.
I knew where we had planted the tree,
but the gates were closed on the trail.
Eden is scarcely a memory now –
it all went by in a flash;
for experience is a burning ember
atop a mound of ash.
Adam was quite an idiot. Why
I loved him I cannot recall.
I think it had something to do with death –
the odors of the first fall.
To immortals, death is another thing;
just what, I can’t remember.
There’s nothing endearing about it like
the tints of pale September.
I wore the time like a dress that year.
It was good to begin to age.
Life was a book; I fingered and thumbed
the grain on the very first page.
This one reminds of me of Adam again,
with much of his vacant stare,
so blissfully mindless of all the needs
he relinquished to my care!
I’ve watched them collapse like dominoes –
Hebrew, Pygmy and Aryan.
Oftentimes it’s seemed my lot
to arrange mortality’s carrion.
I’d no idea, when I was Eve,
that Adam was merely the first.
When I left the garden and the apples,
I guessed we both were accursed.
Later it became clear to me
that as Eve I was temporary.
I’m a mixed-mode mortal-immortal now –
I call it “age and tarry.”
Age and tarry, tarry and age,
and wait for time to turn the next page.
Age and tarry, tarry and age.
I don’t know if there’s a final stage.
(As I’ve said above I know firsthand
that the book’s a chest of errors
the tale into which I’m written as Eve, though,
seems to suggest there is.)
III.
I’ll tell you this: we’re little more
than the words that allow us to think.
That’s why I prefer the sonic world
to books of expendable ink.
For the little more than we are of words
can be superscribed in notes.
Melody’s simply the art of releasing
our pearls in paper boats,
and pearls are the jeweled removes in ourselves
that haven’t yet come to tongue.
The trick is to coax them out of the corners
to which they have been flung.
One requires, having accepted the task
to bring these removes to sound,
a composure, a readiness that I call
“existence on the bound.”
The “bound” is both boundary and limit,
anticipation and leap,
the event of language sleeping and
what collects in it when it’s asleep.
It is hard, though, not to lose your way
in the depths of this murky Rhein.
After a certain number of lives,
I could not say the pearls were mine.
Yes, existence on the bound requires
a certain amount of daring;
when boundaries are no longer clear,
you become more careful, sparing.
And you wonder who could peer into them,
and from what heights up above –
those depths of blank, millennial weight
that slowly accrue to your love.
For love is no more clear to you
than the light that peers in from the moon.
You forget of love how it began
in the double-backed rigadoon!
(And speaking of which, it was I who had
to show Adam what to do;
he’d been granted all the necessities,
but unequipped with a clue.)
to be continued…
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