The second poem I'm going to read
is the second poem in the book.
It is a poem on the premiere of the French avant
garde composer's, Messiaen's "Quartet For the End of Time".
It was actually premiered in a prisoner of war camp.
It wasn't a Holocaust camp, but mostly French and Belgian
prisoners in Görlitz, Silesia in 1941.
Messiaen wrote the quartet.
The clarinet, the cello, the violin
were already somehow in the camp in the possession
of the prisoners, and the guards were kind enough to truck
in an old upright piano.
The quartet, as many of you will know,
imitates as much of Messiaen's work does,
some bird calls, and refers in some of its section titles
to angels, Messiaen being a devout Catholic composer
as well as an avant garde composer.
Now, this is called-- and there were
5,000 prisoners in the camp.
The poem is called "10,000 Ears Stood Out From Shaved Heads
And Listened".
The premiere of Messiaen's "Quartet For The End Of Time",
Görlitz, Silesia, 1941.
Tearing our roots together with the branches of birds.
Tearing everything, and this is love.
Can we imagine God's unhappiness that we are not with him?
He protects us from it with angels more naked
even than this music, so this music seems
to say, no, not naked, not nothing,
like putting your arm into light all the way up to the shoulder.
Nothing beside this clarinet giddy nest of heralding birds,
as if birds didn't drop the shit of the Earth on the Earth,
didn't drop dead there.
Oh fowl that fly in the open firmament of heaven.
First darlings of morning.
This violin pulling a cloth of mist
from its sanctuary of cries, giving heart to the piano
that clumps like a tree learning to hop.
This cello wailing high and higher,
a quail choked by an angel, a castrated thing,
all without show of arrangement as in a forest
when whatever must sing goes ahead and does it.
What was the stalag to think?
Was the cesspool suddenly burnished as a lake of lions,
Did diarrhea stop?
Did scarlet fever snow through the branches of the music?
Did the holes in the fence pass through the holes
in the fence unmolested?
The Belgian attache forget to remember
to announce again that the Holy See had ruled out danger.
This is not recorded.
Nor what was changed by this unbearable blare, the clarinet
crawling all the way into a single note of itself,
less and more than itself, swelling at monstrously,
forgetting it stops forgetting itself.
A laser of sound boring through everything till history
is what no one has to.
As when in the forest whatever has
sung at the exact moment of its need
ceases, and the silence at first unawares
howls like an angel who can stand no more of it.
That was the show of it.
It was the end of music.
It was survived by music.
These angels with seven trumpet throats,
did you think they would be lilies, that God was a pollen?
An angry gang of octaves jamming the ears with their avant garde
holiness, holier than thou, holiness.
Shouting in the face of women, and France shouting the Alps
into grave mounds.
Still the men were patient.
How good they were.
Never was I listened to with such rapt
attention and comprehension.
As if the music could take back the dropped boot of eternity.
As if God would stay up all night for them.
As if the music that made light of their flesh
could make light of their flesh.