34
PARTISAN REVIEW
My musical box night is the absurd
And terrible anthem that I play to Time.
Confusion in the vivid core
Invigorates these no-wise lovely arms.
My tears fall in musical wells,
I shake combs from my hair like bells.
The box is abstract, dark and without choice,
The box I compass in a talking head.
No evening is as dark as I could wish
Who wear my music as an inlaid wood,
Who see a music as the night goes wide
Compass the rising tide.
Where is that demon who is born of night,
The gull of death without
his
crying talons?
His hurdy gurdy over years of light
Wheels with its taut embracing flexible columns.
He is the X to whom I play the drums
Through dutiful quiet rooms.
He is the winding music that I choose,
My ravelled sleeve, my polyphonic wrongs,
The black to-morrow that I never play;
Music in death and man as I go round
Is hidden in the pier or a sea wind
Will bear it idly home.
The music time, as fabulous as love,
Took once tempestuous the deathrope's slack,
Music, the singleton of noise, said how
God saved me kindly from the tall "trees' fall,
Told how the deathsailed ship in sight of land
Broke on the island rock,
And what was timely in the singing voice
Rose from t}le sea, took people for its friends,
And worshipped idols during many years;
Music said how the physiologue ran,
That man of terror, through a pathless sea,
To nothing that we recognize as ours.
JULIAN SYMONS
