After-Music

Music

12 M u s i C Musick, the Mosaique of the air —Andrew Marvell, “Musick’s empire” Cornet and cymbal, viol and the choir— “Those practicing the Wind and those the Wire”— all place their subtly colored chips of sound just here and here until three vines have wound their green chromatic stems around an urn, a bunch of grapes, a bird. Where did they learn to master this mosaic of the air? each marble quarter note is fingered there where its clean edge will catch the echoing light. another motif now: the shadowed white of fleece—six sheep—and Christ in golden stone, seated, sandaled, lit by an overtone of loss. a solo, a concluding strain, and Christ is gone. now scattered blue notes—rain? no, larger cadences call in the sea itself, and neptune drives four sinewy 1 fish-tailed stallions through the drumming brine, past dwarfs on dolphins, past the serpentine border of eels, to our mosaic’s slow dissolve. We ride the water but we know the surge that sweeps up dolphins and despair is sound, not stone, a fragile twist of air that sends its viney cipher to the ear and then, like winter breath, must disappear. The colors fade. an ordinary breeze bends the long grass and shuffles through the trees. ...