On (or The Anvil Song) (11/8/07)

You can hear his hand slide along the guitar neck
as Julian Bream plays a Bach cantata,
you can see and hear the machinations of the stage,
see the turning of the music sheets and readjustment of the stands
and the positioning of the viols between the knees
and then witness the lowering of the lights.
You see and hear the mike booms locked in place
the manual repositioning of snake-like wiring on the stage floor,
see the raising of the painted sets on the desert film-lot
hear the hammer and the saw behind the facade.
You can see the desert is painted but not the paint-by-numbers
you see the stencils on the canvas-backed chairs and equipment lockers
and the wardrobes cast onto the floor.
You can hear commands to raise the boom or put the lights out
you see the painted scenery and hear the grunt of the pianist
which in proportion to the harmony of the piece is atonal
you see the constellations and the scaffolding
and the printing of luminiscent images of morning hung on the passenger bus
and the gears behind the facade of the clock that hangs above City Hall
as the moon hung over the trees and the sun in the west hung over the hill
you can hear the hand creak as the web between thumb and forefinger
rubs the neck of the guitar as the Bach cantata is played
You hear the foot as loudly as the pedal and the string hit by the plectrum.
You see the plywood sets raised on the edge of the desert,
the highway behind the Roman slave revolt
hear the engines of the junked cars in the deserts idle
as clearly as the operations it takes to make the constellations appear on a clear night.
You see the day set raised and the set for night brought down
as clearly as the hand that turns the Open sign to Closed or Occupied to Vacant.
You see the luminiscence of gears behind the clockface and the idling of the engine in the desert.
You hear the intangible become as palpable as a navel orange or an acorn or beer-can tossed in a cow-pond.

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You can hear the fence palings driven into the soft ground
and the squish of the boot-heel as vividly as the sound
of the CitiCard slipped into the ATM and the rattle of bills
the cash dispenser spits, a slot behind two rubber rollers
fitted with sensors to prevent the dispensation of too much money in bills.
This is the house in a blue state Citicard built in its marketing department
and along with the old folks singing while the old man plucks a ukelele
that is also part of the overall marketing strategy, as if to say,
you don't just purchase a thing with this card, you purchase a life (so get one)
not just the rafters and the roof-beams and the studs and floor-joists
but what happens in the space of living-room, kitchen, bedroom and foyer
the sensibility in addition to the tasteful things that constitute the sensibility
the material that buttresses and shapes the character of the spirit
belief of which can incriminate: not the other way around, kid.

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Hear the clink of the anvil over the Atwater-Kent amid the steam of bean sprouts
and the thousand-strong sound of mites chewing into the blades of corn
or Chinese cabbage in the kitchen-garden, or the unctuous squish of red slugs
as they methodically consume the translucently pale green leaves of lettuce
into skeletal remains, like the denuded boundaries of lights on amusement rides.
The kitchen garden is a seething of blonde wings and black eggs and broken tares.
When you close your eyes you envisage worms orbiting pebbles in clods of earth
and you falsely suspect the order of things underneath to be concentric.

The opera music between the clink of anvils could put you to sleep.
Could there be many anvils hit by hammers or is there only one hammer.
You know that after the breaking of hammers, only the anvil remains.
Do not porpoises receive the scars of outboard motor propellers as scores
or half-moons as bears do or manatees, that most distant cousin of elephant
and hyrax, beaver-like in size yet an ungulate with the sheep and alpaca,
chewing its cud while sunning itself on a rock in deserts or among mountains
of the Levant? dreaming of its scarred-up cousins underneath outboards.