New Dark Ages

Wartime

Wartime All the more beautiful in the concert hall with people in their fine clothes and yourself in the same place as the original music. The rest, I imagine, must be like the sound of a radio orchestra in the nineteen-forties, Europe fiddling beneath the darkness, and those abandoned in the capital cities leaning into the sound as it becomes noise. Our lives seldom advance. And the beautiful is a principle either too large or too small to contain so much loose and indispensable striving. That is why I think of music, why I love even the idea of an orchestra in the open spaces of the outdoors and worried corners of rooms during the blitz, my love's last hours. They do not move much, but they are real. They live in the anticipation and in the backwards aftermath. They feel light canceling the illumination of the previous moment when I told you Europe was dead. Mahler already knew. That is why I said that being inside of you is the harsh Symphony and withdrawing from you 47 a song at the end, something of the earth too large for desire, too small to survive. And these analogies are still nowhere close to you, close to me, who arc trying so hard to believe that things arc not the hallucinations of bad history or of autumn settling into its long self-pity of mists and overripeness apt not to change. In early November, the city parks hum beneath the thinnest frost. The couples and solitaries have got it wrong at the lake's edge, feeding the birds, saying nothing to themselves or to each other about the coming holidays, the anticipation buried close by, in the wrong place perhaps, but someplace. It fills the earth like music. 48 ...