SINISTRA

When I and my symmetric brother

were born it could not be said

who would dominate

or be preferred though custom

meant that he would be

the one to shake

and with time we learned

that he would write

open doors

hold the bow

play the major note.

I had an alien role:

clumsy, I had no right

to take the lead

or cut the steak,

or make the model boats

or brush the teeth.

The best that I could do

was squeeze the paste

hold the fork

lift the case

perhaps share

a wash with him together

and then with face.

I had my place

at the piano, true,

to add the bass

to his excursive treble

to help with typing

but not with pleasuring

either the body of my owner

or that of another –

well, sometimes perhaps

but with a lot of trouble …

But when the right was damaged

my lack of education

was reformed. 

Suddenly I was taught

to shave,

to guide the penis as it peed,

cut as well as hold the steak

scribble crumpled messages

with pens,

compute.

Once over, I took back

my old dysgraphic role

a slave to all that’s right.

No voice,

today I have no choice

but to live on handouts

and the occasional leftover.

AIR

The God of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps,

he learned as part of his youthful catechism

but now at eighty, breathlessly awaiting cataclysm,

he wonders if He also weeps

as he does, in the early hours awake,

scorned by the darkness, choked by panic,

impotent in a dream of drowning, frantic,

gasping, ‘What step, O God, to take’?

He was an engineer and knew what ticked,

worked on tall buildings, watched his wife

as her motor neurones lost their life

thirty years ago, saw her slacken, food stick.

The irony was not lost on him that both

she, no muscles, and he, no lungs or air,

were united in a book of common prayer.

A unifying recitation, welcome death.

Clouds of incense smoke at his funeral mass

embrace the word and prayers.

“He was never one to give himself airs,”

the priest says, and Freud lets the moment pass.

MAKING MUSIC

The cobbles of Arezzo,

their order and community,

were sermons for the pious

monk named Guido Monaco

as he walked along the road.

While wondering what God

may be saying to him

Guido’s mind strayed to ways

whereby he might follow

the example of the stones, their fit,

permanence and community,

to create order and stability

for the music in his church.

Music had no written record,

was passed from generation

to generation in Christendom

for a thousand years

by laborious recitation,

endless repetition.

It travelled from one place to another

by father’s voice to son

who journeyed with it,

its glories shackled by

the boredom of rote learning

its accuracy blunted

while the liturgy and the chanted words

were written, unchanging yet open to exegesis

but not to the distorting caprice

of imperfect memory.

From the sermon in stones Guido took away

a vision in which the music of the chants

was secured like the cobbles

in the ordered pavement

as were the words written

in the chants, a dream of system,

permanence and metalanguage

where notes and cadences

high and low and in between

were written down as were the prayers.

His contemplations

led Guido to write basic notes

above the lines of chants

He assigned letters

to the syllables of music,

each for a different pitch,

tracing their passage

on four horizontal lines.

The sequence of neumes

hung like small black birds along the lines.

Guido then used his antipher

of lines and neumes

in his church in Arezzo

praising God for its wonder and order.

At the pope’s request,

Guido took his music to Rome in 1020,

winning John XIX’s endorsement.

Although Guido’s music was not popular

Rudolf of Moustier-sur-Sambre

brought it to choristers in Belgium:

though they did not know Italian

they learned to sing

as from Arezzo

using Guido’s system

of annotation.

Asked why he wept so often

Rudolf replied it was from joy

as, he said, he had found a ladder into heaven.