Program Music

Outside the coffee-shop, the boxer with shaved head
admits liking Mahler. His windbreaker proclaims
a training camp in Lowell. One of the black-shirted staff
stops her sweeping to talk. Acne on her cheeks
scars features otherwise delicate. Pedestrians wrap coats
around them, ever more tightly -- if they have them.

Perfect weather for wind-breakers, nothing so cumbrous
as goose-down. The boxer admires music
without lyrics. Program music, I want to add, watching
ochre stones that arc above the picture windows
of the art school alternate with tan ones. Style: Eclectic,
Moorish, Romanesque? What do those gray thinkers
think on the frieze of granite over the view, beginning
with Socrates, leaping to Spinoza, onto Jefferson?

Color, however, is missing. There is no lack of music.
But the tribe for which it’s being sung cannot be
so easily identified. Who bothers listening to lyrics?
The music muddles what the boxer has already said
until I cannot trace the course of his argument
through the air. Maybe I can overhear him
when I leave the coffee-shop, its central location
so convenient -- from my door a hop, a skip, a jump.

The alternative weekly (name to go unmentioned)
featured black-face masks like those of minstrels
for turn-of-the-century handbills, but repeated
like overcrowded wallpaper patterns – ho hum,
fleur-de-lys and trellis, ribbons, globes, and masks.
Nothing in the listings. Enters in a summer dress a girl
who confesses she hasn’t been in town all winter
and has never, this entire time, seen the snow melt:

shame. Dumped in lots. No problem. To communicate
emotion, such as Mahler’s, words are unrequired,
program music being how things sound: valkyries
who drop from storm-clouds in a cascade of notes
and make figures that fall. He won the fight, and not
by decision either: his opponent fell. Missing a season
is not like missing a note or a box-office feature,

which can be acquired in a video store months after
the gala premiere. So the summer blockbusters
can be in your hands by spring. Even on windy days
you never need to miss an episode. Even snow
can be communicated: place your hand in a freezer
before defrost: imagine cities inside. Their inhabitants
wrap their blazers around themselves more tightly

as if to live were to be tossed capriciously, not fallen
as opponent or victim – nothing so serious as all that –
and lacking certain listings for films, you must call
the theater or stop living vicariously through shop-fronts
and these alternative weeklies: what’s the non-alternative
version anyway? Tell me. I want to know. Communicate

without ornament, without a tongue – if you can. I lack
the term for that kind of masonry. But it surprised me,
although I must have passed it by a thousand times.