New Music

To Larry Sitsky

Who can grasp for the first time

these notes hurled into empty space?

Suddenly a tormenting nerve

affronts the fellowship of cells.

Who can tell for the first time

if it is love or pain he feels,

violence or tenderness that calls

plain objects by outrageous names

and strikes new sound from the old names?

At the service of a human vision,

not symbols, but strange presences

defining a transparent void,

these notes beckon the mind to move

out of the smiling context of

what's known; and what can guide it is

neither wisdom nor power, but love.

Who but a fool would enter these

regions of being with no name?

Secure among their towering junk

the wise and powerful congregate

fitting old shapes to old ideas,

rocked by their classical harmonies

in living sleep. The beggars’ stumps

bang on the stones. Nothing will change.

Unless, wakeful with questioning,

some mind beats on necessity,

and being unanswered learns to bear

emptiness like a wound that no

word but its own can mend; and finds

a new imperative to summon

a world out of unmeasured darkness

pierced by a brilliant nerve of sound.

GWEN HARWOOD

Klangfarbe

At the first performance

of his twenty-minute sonata

for trombone and lightbulb,

based – so the programme note told us –

on a reading of Jung’s

Seelenprobleme der Gegenwart,

the most eloquent detail

and the one I shall remember

beyond all those whomps and rasps and splintered high notes

was the ping of the filament.

CHRISTOPHER REID

Tinnitus

August, sun beating the rooftops

for Alain Palacci

You are walking down a road that is white with dust.

It could be a dream; it could be the dream will last,

unlike any shape or shade of love you care

to name (or find and follow if you must).

Empty, white with dust, and something stopless in the air:

the chain-stitch of cicadas; a dynamo somewhere.