How to remember music
It can be difficult to remember music, and also to remember its invention
How the memory served us in our vacancy
Self-absence, relentlessness of pursuit, of a place
A position. Our timelines:
sanctimonious,
“cleaner” in the telling than in the remembering.
No one lived those precious revolutions,
Not even Ledbelly, the Carter Family,
But we all imagined them
And what was lived turned far in advance of the revolution
No one sang those rhythms, that we believe we have forgotten.
No one can dismantle the pillowed ruins.
“If we haven’t destroyed the ruins, we haven’t destroyed anything.”
That one — the one just past! — was the century of the Eiffel Tower,
The tall buildings that followed it.
Abundances of balloons, or images of them
Planes still farther forward in an uncharted imagination
Tires and axels, a software as imperfect as any
Asphalt operating systems
Text by telegraph, followed irrationally by
Lighter-weight make-up kits, finally available
More freely, more robust, more knowing
The hoot-like beeps on miniature tapes, and before them: a request,
The bourgeois messages. “Were you there? I may have been late.”
The softer bread and safer stairways that we should remember better than music.
That we should remember anything before
These things … is a joke so thrilling,
In its sheer implausibility,
Mixed somehow, with a myth
That we were ever anything.
Now back again, to the ices and clod-diggers
And the sci-fi rainbows of the tudor crowns:
Can we remember
A map of Africa and the fertile crescent,
Contorted and arbitrary,
Nearly useless in its shape, taken down
From geometers’ hopes and recollections?
Remember it, furnish it, unfinished
Remember its year, orbiting
Remember a built-up space containing an airplane
Such a mind
Sublime as a pear
And a spoon, to the eye?