-
If you survey four centuries of Passions, and: Roll tape
- Prairie Schooner
- University of Nebraska Press
- Volume 78, Number 1, Spring 2004
- pp. 26-29
- 10.1353/psg.2004.0035
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Prairie Schooner 78.1 (2004) 26-29
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Two Poems
Dionisio D. Martínez
If you survey four centuries of Passions
If you survey four centuries of Passions, from Lassus to Johann Sebastian
Bach to Arvo Pärt, you come away with the sense that Jesus was not un-like James Bond, whose character is passed like a baton from one actor
to the next, and we're expected to believe each of them as if there wereonly one. Jesus doesn't know if he's a tenor or a bass. One day he's more
intrigued by the dying, one day it's the rising out of sheer boredom from [End Page 26]a colorless slumber some mistake for death. There are many documented
cases of people being buried alive. Along with drowning and burning, itmust rank among the fates we'd least like to encounter. We think and say
these things as if we had the thumb on the stopwatch. How many timeshas 007 lost his youth, regained his hair, softened his accent? Depending
on how you approach it, passion is: suffering: a kind of harm: a vastlymisunderstood endurance. It's even a destruction of sorts. Slice what
seems like the final layer and you have: scarcely [see pathos, see thisunfortunate unraveling]. Every Passion hinges on a Judas, necessary
antagonist in the carpenter's tale. His place on the staff is just as fluidand his power runs the same risks. The town can only spare
so many
Magdalenes and Bond is on his way. Which Bond, no one can tell. Whenhe passes by, the tenor and the bass - having learned each other's lines
and feeling somewhat overconfident - are engrossed in a game of dice. [End Page 27]
Roll tape
roll tape. The subject is entering the building. Detached and safe as
a man behind a smokescreen. But the subject is not a man; it's
a wide-open noun cut loose from the predicate. This is what happens when terms
become ambiguous. A spot grows on the lens; we watch until we cannotsee. cue voice-over. If this were for you and I'm not saying it isn't if
this were somehow intended to convey emotion if this were the beginningof what Bogie suggests in the fog that swallows Casablanca the pretense
of the stoics the burst of strength one needs to remain composed underthe pressure of knowing that one can really get away with anything if
this were the invasion if this were the retreat. Rewind. The buildingwill not accommodate our ideal bodies. It's a notion that a layman, even
one who thinks as if setting a formal table, would never call the poeticsof space. Why is it that those immersed in the most pragmatic of the [End Page 28]
arts - the housing of the body - rarely think in brick and mortar? Theyrun past the clearing in the field and past the field itself to where all
that is said comes out twisted, the way we imagine the car around atree when we hear the story of last night's accident. If it was indeed an
accident. Pause. We were talking about buildings when the car camegunning for the tree. It could've just as easily been a building. Fear can
make of an architect a man of words, his words the builders of ruins.
Dionisio D. Martínez has won the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, as well as NEA, Guggenheim, and Whiting Fellowships. His latest books include Climbing Back and Bad Alchemy, both from Norton.