Thank you, loves.
As I'm sorry I didn't find the imprint of my tiny hands
in the sidewalk outside, I heard this fighting after.
Mainly tonight I'll be reading with my friend Peter Hooten
a rather long passage from The Changing Light of Sandover,
but let me soften you up or decide
you to leave after these shorter excerpts, some earlier poems.
This is called The Victor Dog and, even though there's
no longer a dog on the label of Victor Records,
I think we have the icon fairly well in mind.
Somebody told me that when Victor Records began
to distribute in India, the dog being an unclean animal,
they had to put a cobra on the record,
listening to the horn of the gramophone.
I couldn't have written my poem about that.
The Victor Dog.
Bix to Buxtehude to Boulez, little white dog
on the Victor label listens long and hard as he is able.
It's all in a day's work, whatever plays.
From judgment, it would seem, he has refrained.
He even listens earnestly to Bloch,
then builds a church upon our acid rock.
He's man's, no, he's the Leiermann's best friend,
or would be if hearing and listening were the same.
Does he hear?
I fancy he rather smells those lemon gold arpeggios
in Ravel's "Les jets d'eau du palais de ceux qui s'aiment."
He ponders the Schumann concertos, tall willow hit
by lightning, and stays put.
When he surmises through one of Bach's eternal boxwood mazes,
the oboe pungent as a bitch in heat,
or when the calypso decants its raw, bay rum or the moon
in Wozzeck reddens ripe for murder,
he doesn't sneeze or howl, just listens harder.
Adamant needles bear down on him from whirling of outer space,
too black, too near, but he was taught as a puppy
not to flinch.
Much less to imitate his bête noir, Blanche, who barked,
fat, foolish creature, at King Lear.
Still others fought in the road's filth over Jezebel,
slathered on hearths of horned and pelted barons.
His forebears lacked, to say the least, forbearance.
Can nature change in him?
Nothing's impossible.
The last chord fades, the night is cold and fine,
his master's voice rasps through the groove's bare groves.
Obediently, in silence like the graves,
he sleeps there on the still warm gramophone only
to dream he is at the premiere of a Handel opera long thought
lost: Il Cane Minore.
Its allegorical subject is his story,
a little dog revolving around a spindle
gives rise to harmonies beyond belief, a cast of stars.
Is there in Victor's heart no honey
for the vanquished or his art?
The life it asks of us is a dog's life.