I have decided I know nothing and to start from there.
To start with a folk song I heard
across some field near Argentière
perhaps fifteen years ago.
The man singing had a poor voice
but failure is most of life.
The cracked pot, the stumble, the harvest in too late.
I would like music to take us not too far from that.
I think of villagers with oak-mallets and old hammers
bashing at stakes as if ensuring the dead stay underground
or stamping and railing at them for their deaths,
jealous of their heavy deaths, those who are filled with earth.
Jealous of their deaths with all the regret of life.
I am hanging silences between thin black notes.
I observe statues of headless men,
an exhibition of smashed vases,
The snow thickening the valleys, field-posts barely visible.
The snow blanketing and deadening
and no music possible.
I envy music that is not possible,
That crawls or stops or curls to face the other way,
that is unlooked-for as bad weather
and soaks us right through beneath the clothes
just as death is a slackening of the mouth.
I would like art to fail in whatever way it wishes.
The heart of music is to point an arm beyond the visible
to the blackness of earth crumbling underground
or otherwise the feeble stars.
