For the Death of Anton Webern Particularly

Sunday gardening, hoeing, trying to think of nothing but

hoeing – so that this at least can be an exercise in the true sense –

nevertheless I can think of little but the death of Anton Webern.

I just happened to read it. It just happened to be Webern.

One has ferreted out and written up at length how the Weberns

went out to dine some night with their daughter and their

(unbeknown to them) blackmarketeer of a son-in-law, shortly

after the American occupation. The G.I. agent provocateur went out

to block any escape. Just at that moment, in the black back yard,

the fragile Webern, out to puff a gift cigar, collided

with the decoy who shot him by mistake. Back home, not knowing

whom he’d killed, but withered by it, this kind man died of drink.

Sunday gardening, hoeing, I turn over the worms in their beds

and am shadowed by the blackbirds. And I have to ask again from what

body-stitching those worms are sundered and picked out writhing to die,

and from what soul-harrowing that Rome of blackbirds flutters down

to drill and gut the worms with javelin beaks, and in the fold of what

wedding of body and desire in Jerusalem I am conceived and born

to offer this show. I need to ask on what Sunday God first churned

his cauldron world in such a manner that we all deal death,

not knowing that we deal it, scarcely caring, yet dying of it too

from afar – in what stew God first mixed meat of worm,

feather and beak of bird and hand of man and what bubbles

send up each in turn to do the other in. And how, at last, the notes

composed by fragile Webern survive the boil and music in the bubbles.

NATHANIEL TARN

After Webern

How to make sense of the unnerving

intervals played on the strings? And what if

the occluded cries rising from the debris

of our enmity

mix with the atonal world

I’ve ventured into? I’ve muted