Garnet Poems: An Anthology of Connecticut Poetry Since 1776

Why All Good Music Is Sad

Chase Twichell (1950– ) Why All Good Music Is Sad Before I knew that I would die, I lolled in the cool green twilight over the reef, the hot sun on my back, watching the iridescent schools flick and glide among stone flowers, and the lacy fans blow back and forth in the watery winds of the underworld. I saw the long, bright muscle of a fish writhing on a spear, spasm and flash, a music violent and gleaming, abandoned to its one desire. The white radiance of Perdido filtered down through the rocking gloom so that it was Perdido there too, in that strange, stroking, half-lit world. Before I knew that love would end my willful ignorance of death, I didn’t think there was much left in me that was virgin, but there was. That’s why all good music is sad. It makes the sound of the end before the end, and leaves behind it the ghost of the part that was sacrificed, a chord to represent the membrane, broken only once, that keeps the world away. That’s how the fish became the metaphor: one lithe and silvery life impaled, fighting death with its own failing beauty, thrashing on the apex of its fear. 214 gArnet poems Art was once my cold solace, the ice pack I held to love’s torn body, but that was before I lay as if asleep above the wavering reef, or saw the barbed spear strike the fish that seemed for an instant to be something outside myself, before I knew that the sea was my bed and the fish was me. ...