Fire Baton: Poems

A Scratch

A Scratch Explaining how to stick the needle into the arm, she fumbles as if she, too, although a librarian, forgets what to do with records. Archaic already, along with my overstuffed earphones, the turntable mat, this LP feels absurdly large and fragile. Its tissue sleeve unwraps unsteadily, one corner crumbling. How did people live with such brittle arrangements of tones, such touch-me-not ridges and grooves? It starts. The spirals pour endlessly into the center, thin but substantial, and gather, pulsing, black as an oil geyser in jubilant movies (crude-stained James Dean and Rock Hudson in Giant) or a washed-up oil spill, if you’d rather have wiser similes. Me, I’m here to forget that. Black as the slicked-back hair of Eugène Ysaÿe, pulsing out of its pomade, thrashing as he played this piece at his wedding feast: 28 September 1886, a glorious (i.e., pleasantly weathered) day. He’d posed 41 HadawayRevisedPages 8/15/06 3:09 PM Page 41 earlier, in sunlight, for photographs with his bride and kin on figured carpet dragged out across cut grass. This work, his favorite present, he’s premiering this evening— César Franck, its author, too frail to travel from Paris, too spent, dedicated and sent his Violin-Piano Sonata. Describe it? I’d be embarrassed; you can look up the details in Proust. I’m only using the music to crash, to pretend Major and Madame Bourdau requested the pleasure of my presence at the marriage of Louise to the conservatory’s coup of a new professor. Here lies the souvenir menu for seventeen courses, tasseled, rosed, monogrammed, scrolled, and engraved with violins. My plumy hat roosts with egrets and ostriches while a fiddling-Cupid card seats me between friends from the groom’s beer-hall band phase: Lindenlaub, his goatee newly trimmed, and Laforgue, who scoots my chair in carefully, not catching my bombazine. Laforgue’s quick-eyed, nervous at first, picking at stuffed spinaches, but the swoopy music eases 42 HadawayRevisedPages 8/15/06 3:09 PM Page 42 his worry over how he’ll make a living now he’s quit reading for the Prussian empress. She gave him a tea service as a parting gift, the sole furnishing for the walk-up in Paris. This music licks his ears. His book’s out soon. The publisher pays. He has just turned twenty-six and what I hear, he hears if he’s listening. He may not be. He may be trying too hard to hold back his cough, which won’t get better. Not even at his wedding, in three months, with no music, on a sunless day in London. Not ever. Or, knowing Laforgue, he’s worried about this bride, just eighteen, a decade younger than his friend who’s already toured Europe and Russia and grown a double chin. She’s nervous enough, and where’s her spouse? His father’s getting proudly soused; his mother (like Laforgue’s) is dead in childbed, and he plays the violin, swaying and stomping, all six and a half feet of him. 43 HadawayRevisedPages 8/15/06 3:09 PM Page 43 Louise watches his hair whipping like something in war stories: the cat-o’-nine tails for deserters. He rocks as if he’s going to fall and crush that instrument. On his ’95 tour of America the baffled pre-Beatle reporters will have visions of houris: sixteen-year-old Philadelphia girls screaming and shredding their gloves. He’ll grow old cheating on her (though usually with titled loves), grow old endorsing Wurlitzer and Columbia Records. Shortbreathed in her corset, her head aching with all the pins bent to hold her trailing veil, she tells herself what does not hurt cannot be beautiful. A good major’s daughter, she refuses to wail until after the music. Then the floorboards creak under the boots of her glassy-eyed brother, home on leave, quarantined with scarlet fever, who escaped from his room to see her despite his skin’s blotched surface. He stumbles at her, begging pardon for looking so ghastly, but can’t stop her scream. She has to be carried out, 44 HadawayRevisedPages 8/15/06 3:09 PM Page 44 delaying the honeymoon. The record pops and hisses. The reserve-and-listening room...