The East Village
Macgregor Card
from Souvenir Winner
for A. G. Rizzoli and A. Skryabin
Scriabinists divide into those preferring odd-numbered
sonatas and those favouring the even. The former spell his
name Skryabin. Let me say to them. Scriabin! Scriabin!
Scriabin!
--Faubion Bowers, from a Skryabin record-jacket verso
Water is negative acousticsit's why no one bothers with
water-ballets. "Coral, it prick up the eye," etcetera. Why
Debussy was afraid of the rain. So I wanted a sort of
cathedral-under-the-sea sound. From that myth of a
cathedral-under-the-sea, disengulfed at midnight, offshore
of Brittany.
--Brian Ferneyhough, on his "Mnemosyne"
Growing, growing, growing, waxing, waxing, seldom waning,
and yet depicting the vision while staring at a blank wall
may never be depicted in this series of overtures Nothing
weird about this despite a tone sounding like outer space
parlance that tonal procedure necessary to undertake to
reproduce the vision in the materials available to those
inhabiting the earth.
--Achilles Rizzoli, "architectural transcriber to God"
V. YIELD TO TOTAL ELATION
Balance a tablet of store-room light on the
showup portion of hope. There's a nestegg
in my fieldscope named ordinary sight--
to hold that egg is to hold that fluke
might play the dorsal fin to vision, every night a lark
is born and somehow wešve all to do with it.
Say it. Everyone can play errand-boy to sight
if anyone can sit still enough to err.
These not the starry wilds? And these?
"Not those kind of starry wilds," then what?
Then huff at the wick of a heavy light,
but say "there is no world but that impinges"
and I'll respond "the stigmatism on my palm
adjusts its aperture to the light."
Dear blue-ribbon mother, ray of lambs
doth bleat through solid night whose
several menial things I can't recall. Introducing
an urban horse. A horse whose heart
is an architect, and a horse whose name is light.
An urban horse will drum up our kathedral out of light.
It's been his only way to flick his ligaments at the world
and still resemble not being lonely in the world.
Now there's no more any longer any reason for feeling lonely.
The field is afire and the field is a vision of light.
This is the winning kathedral. No less a pearl, even for an earl.
The Palace God is building for that winsome little girl.
We are almost tempted to call him sweetheart.
The light that made Jesus speak through a sonnet.
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