Intimate Letters by Bruce Whiteman

Author:Bruce Whiteman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poetry
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2014-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

Death by Music

The headphones clung to his scalp like a kell, as Mozart’s final music poured into his unlistening ears. Eternal light wasn’t at issue. Death is a dead end always. He lay there rigid and no longer able to speak, wrung from life by the loss of love and organ failure. No need to guess which one.

III

Music to Sleep In

After Spicer

“Music to sleep in”

— Jack Spicer, “Orfeo,” A Book of Music

I

Orpheus presumably lay in the open air on a lektron of ground cover good for a few eclectic hours of bourgeoning sleep. His cithara would rot in the humid night air if he lived long enough. One night he dreamt prophetically of driving in a car with Eurydice at the wheel. Technology is so much more easily imagined than the heart’s future. He broke down in tears and upon being asked why could only say, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Eurydice, wearing a chauffeur’s cap and ruby-red lipstick, began to sing, “No more grieving, no more dying, o my life, o my heart’s treasure,” the right consolation from the wrong opera.

The cat called Grace is licking its paw and cleaning off the dirt of the urban garden where she sleeps. Her night music is the cawing of crows and the creepy oversight of a television ramped up for a deaf man living nearby. Purple agapanthus guard her fragile body. Cats dream of the screams of mice and wrench themselves awake when noisy rain begins to fall. The garden rots amid pussy thoughts of a dry season.

Freud said, “Even the predisposition towards perversions must not be something rare and special but is part of the constitution that is considered normal.” Normal Eurydice roused him out of sleep with morning pee, “half smiling down at nothing” Keats would later say, pressing Orpheus to ecstasy. The music of the everyday begins right then and never stops. Orpheus adds a note from time to time.

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