7.21.2005

Listening to Jubilee on Mars, I was reminded of something I'd read about the cacaphony-harmony of Russian church bells, which reminded me of this section of >July (a kind of found poem):

 7


Maybe it is the belfry of the Church of the Nativity
of the mother of God but it is still cold as Hades
60 feet up a corkscrew staircase shoulders
brush the cobbled walls the stumbling ascent


a blend of dirge, railroad-crossing clanger and
shattering wine goblet a disharmonious sweetness
makes a beeline what they create and give away
no Muzak peal can duplicate It is peace in the soul


said Mr. Dorokhin, 29 cacaphonous and
hypnotic the miracle is that they ring at all
its bells were carted off the vacant building
(gagged) became a holding pen for circus lions


When it's cold like this, it sounds better
Russian bells are stationary the ringer strikes
them by pulling the tongue with a rope carefully
tuned, but harmony is coincidental a tree


of iron droning like a cork within ethereal
and capering fire or an upside-down Higgs
particle afloat in a cup of gegenschein
or a grain of faith profound and whole


lifted overhead into far-off rooftop watercolors
and a basil swell where the turbulence began
where a spiral snakes into interior nègre
like a turnstone wheeling Hamlet's cradle


of inward sin simultaneously out into a hamlet
of fate at the navel of a rippling font of sound
where his father's agenbite incuse nostos
just rest spins the will toward Elsinore


a cue for the angel troubling the water
in a maze of circles with a rod of iron
for restitution at last this diorite
horizon of my clay you turn...


1.26.2000

No comments: