Chord Box: Poems

Margin, Error

Margin, Error Vincenzo Galilei (1520–1591),lutenist,composer,music theorist, and father of Galileo Galilei The numbers always failed when forced with heaven’s weight: absolute,holy— what about the gut, and its unknown flaws—if an octave is perfect then why the fifth impure? Galilei picks up where Pythagoras tossed his hammer to the sand, having sketched the first crude ratios from a water glass and a row of bells. But what is rational in day by night is spun back to question—and so in the dim of his studio, Galilei’s work is all refrain. Again with ballast he ties and plucks, asks God to foil muteness. Squaring 56 weights: two to four, three to nine—the intervals pronounce just as they slip, their dissonance slight as heartbeat. Poised with pen, he stutters through the figure.This ratio of tension and octave not, in fact, Pythagorean 2:1, but more abstruse: varying with square root, and also instinct. Sonority— a capricious code—casts, recasts in human form. He stirs in his chair.What note, he thinks, is not played tremblingly, or untunes from bloating wood—it’s summer, the Arno hisses.A rough watermark, this new equation, one of nearly-, almost: chaos. Despite the late hour, it seems noisy in this house, and every house.Walls echo 57 with the children’s arguments, scratching pens, the squeak of their compass. So unsettled, all of them— stirring nights with their questions, and awake again before dawn, already thumbing at lutes. 58 ...