After the Fall: Poems Old and New

Callas

Callas The voice that came out of her chose her as its earthly vehicle, for reasons only the gods can know. She spoke of it as separate from her, a wild creature she had to struggle to master. It floats like an unwieldy bird with a small head whose wings can’t quite control the over-large body soaring dangerously low above jagged peaks, wobbling in the updrafts. Like an Egyptian sculpture of a priestess, she held up her large, arresting hands, invoking the authority of the ancients— hawks, serpents, bulls, and suns surrounded her as she sang, cut into stone. She had that specialized genius for song birds have, an intelligence of too high a vibration for the practical matters of life. But she was unfaithful to her gift— even if for the understandable reasons of being fashionable and getting a man— otherwise she would never have dieted down, but stayed fat for those spectacular tones, living only for art. It was an operatic fate that the man she suffered over was one of the great rats who dismissed the most magnificent voice in the world 174 as just a whistle in her throat. But after her sexless marriage, this was probably the first man with a hard-on she got together with, and duck-like, fixated on, as is so common with us ordinary slobs. With some men, whatever they are besides, the cock is the best part of them, even if they are monsters and, like him, supremely ruthless. And perhaps his selfishness is what ravished her, for it was sexuality in the raw, the one thing singing wasn’t. Like Norma, the Druid nun, who broke her vows for the love of a mere mortal, she, too, was cast aside, not for any high priestess, but a more earthly rival, famous widow, jet-set icon, who didn’t need his powerful cock, just his power, and a big allowance. She threw away her magic voice for a man who threw her away— thunderclap in the heavens, an accusing dagger of lightning— and her crystal brain— whose single-minded command like a bird’s was to soar, to sing— shattered, and she fell. 175 ...