O
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O the man’s contrabasso seems to groan. And O and O her medley seems to moan.
Music as feeling, then, not sound. Music as so much more, at least this time round.
A cross, he thinks, between some blueblack sigh of plainchant and the memory of those half-
heard riverhaunted Mississippi blues. Or a bridge of sorrows like some age-old bruise
cascading from the choiring shadows in the upper loft: these crests and shallows,
these syllables that knife into his very marrow as he kneels there in the pinewood pew below.
What to call this ache, this unearthly tremolo of moans, these bubbling sibilants, this O and O
that has found him out and once again reminds him of the empty O he is, as now the blank abyss within
gives way like some mountain glacier, just so, and disappears into the yawning maw below
until at last it flutters dovelike down, this O, and comes to nest, as on that day so long ago
when those who surely must have loved him held his tiny forehead above the marble rim
while the kind cold waters of the Holy Ghost woke him and he cried out with his own and infant o. [End Page 269]
Paul Mariani is the University Professor of English emeritus at Boston College. He is the author of eighteen books, including biographies of William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane and—most recently—Wallace Stevens. He has published seven volumes of poetry, including Deaths & Transfigurations, Epitaphs for the Journey (Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2012), and Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius (Penguin, 2003). His awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim and the NEA and NEH, and he is the recipient of the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. For many years he taught at the Bread Loaf Writers and the Image Conferences. His life of Hart Crane, The Broken Tower, a feature-length film, directed by and starring James Franco, was released by Rabbit Bandini Productions in 2012. paul.mariani@bc.edu
