Peter Galen Massey

On Seeing Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos Conduct During His 79th Year

We clapped because we thought
You might not make the short walk
From the stage door to the podium.
You were shrunken and shuffling

In your baggy black clothes and
A starched white butterfly hung
Loose round your fragile neck.
But you seemed determined.

You sat down scoreless, harangued
The orchestra, caressed the air, and
We heard joy in command of mighty
Sound, saw joy in making, shared

Joy that sustains bone and breath
Beyond the endurance of matter.

Pop Songs

When you get old, the only way
To fall in love is with a pop song.
Every other love is settled or too
Much trouble unless your pain is
Desperate, your luck unlucky, or
Your impulses poorly controlled.
There are no other enthrallments
For the blood. The hottest kisses
Grow tepid in hundreds repetitions.
The climactic orchestral tingle lessens,
The taste of fine cool wines dulls, and
Blazing lines of genius aren’t quite embers
Enough to keep you warm. But the pop song
Is that impossible girl who might have been the
Unknown unknowable thing you wanted once in
Another lifetime and for ten days she consumes you
Entirely. All your feeling is hers and you have no desire
Save to drink and drink the heady elixir of her voice.
Then she is gone: the champagne bubbles of her
Enchantment all winked out. In youth, embrace
The girl who puts your head to spin. In age,
Stick to songs from Carly Rae Jepsen.

On Hearing Johnny Cash Sing “Spiritual” in Old Age

When you stepped into the booth, did
You feel gone from the earth? Did you
Fear even your voice would be lost in
The silence of the headphones? That
Your final fragile fight was exhausted,
Only pain and loneliness enduring in
The human soul? How this mess of
Warm tears spilling through my fingers
While I try to choke them down, from a
Song bought on impulse, with no more
Care or intention than a bag of chips
Purchased with pocket change? Now
Weeping for all deaths since we first
Saw the stars and thought them bright.
When I’m stripped to every nothing but
Ash, sing my pleadings in the voice of
Johnny Cash.

Listening to Kane’s Bardsey Sound While Stuck in Traffic on the Schuylkill

The cellos made me wish I was standing
On a long shore of the sea, the breeze
Strong in my face, the knife of the cold
Cutting the seams of my clothes, slow
Steel clouds above, slow steel waves
Below weakly battering the stony beach,
November and all of winter before me,
The roll roar surge swell hush hump of
The Atlantic’s vastness writing a book of
Every word in every language, speaking
Every voice telling every story, promising
To make us nothing and everything in its
Overwhelming embrace.

Levon Helm

Lie down and rest, Levon, in the green
Unspoiled country you sang into being.
How did you hear what we could not?
The strong secret pulse of the soft dew,
The fresh peerless morning, the plowed
Fields, the warmth of the blessing sun,
The cut wheat, the lovely shimmering of
The leaves, the bright moss on wet stone,
You voiced and told with skin and wood.

How could a flame so pure consume the
Candle? Tell me youth and joy in making
Are enough to stun time and free us from
The ticking clock of flesh. I will not believe
Age and sickness ravaged you though I saw
Them with my eyes. You will always be on
Scorsese’ stage, in your Woodstock barn,
Before us swirled in beat and harmony,
Songs intensely blue like a summer sky,
Luminous, invincible.

Poets often wish they were another kind of artist. In my case, I have always wanted to play music, which is impractical because I possess a decisive and all-encompassing lack of musical talent. Still I often wish I were a musician. I envy how intensely alive in the moment their art is and how the best music is played with other musicians in front of an audience to create a community of joy.

The work of musicians could not be more different from the work of poets. When musicians play music alone in a room, they call it practicing and while it is a necessary discipline it is not their work. When poets write alone in a room, it is our work – all of it – and we only get to leave that room when we are done. Our moments of greatest creativity go unnoticed and unknown. We don’t usually meet our readers and when we do, it’s often after they have had time to think about the ways our poems fall short. And we can be lonely creatures because our work requires solitude and because we are consumed by the ideas, stories, characters, and emotions which fill our heads and which can crowd out the real people in our real lives.

Poetry does have its compensations. If poetry is a lonely occupation, it is also one that liberates us from the need for troublesome and unreliable collaborators. Poets don’t have to struggle with temperamental instruments, challenging acoustics, or the limits of mechanical reproduction. Any legible copy of a poem delivers its full experience, which is not improved by handsome printing and binding (although these books do make fine gifts, our shop is right this way).

If a poem is less alive in the moment than music, because the acts of writing and reading are separated by time and space, poetry and its reading are more durable. Music is here and gone, much like the moment in which we are always living. Poetry can endure across centuries, sitting on a shelf and waiting for a reader in whose hands the words become as alive again as they were during the moment they were written. And if the loneliness of the poet is a burden, it is relieved by the thought that somewhere, sometime perhaps our work makes an unknown reader less lonely.

All art is an argument with life, time, and death the artist loses. So I was surprised and not surprised going through my files looking for poems about music to discover that the ones I had written were often about old musicians living in the moment and losing their arguments with time. I find these poems hopeful rather than tragic. Everyone dies. Not everyone is blessed with chances to live in passion and joy, as the musicians in these poems are blessed.