The New Lyre

Look up at the sky, her shimmering skirts. You probably see power lines. But all I see are fists, squeezing electricity from the air, shattering the lyre. The great blue lyre we call the sky. The great blue ribbed cathedral ceiling stretched over our heads like music. Transformers transform transformation into uniformity. But Apollo’s forked swallow tail will sever the city’s nerves, enforcing a new music. And the only catgut in the new lyre will be feral cats in the throes of love, howling their guts out.

Friends: an evil haze envelopes us, of diabetic fat and greenhouse gases, entombing our future.

Hearken, neighbor, in your peaceful house. Outside, chaos is beginning to sing. Chaos of broken strings, the broken bits and shattered pieces of the lyre. Music is memory. Thanks to memory (and her daughters, the Muses) the dismembered is re-membered. Harmony loves chaos. Join the love hymn. The refuse on the highway side is beginning to sing.

Muses. Daughters of memory. Daughters of creation. Remember something long forgotten and listen to it chuckle, newborn, in its basinet of Yesteryear.

All I have are words, broken remnants of a shattered harmony.

Contact high. Contact music. “Increase” is a passive verb. A boy, I increased: I was increased. Taller by the altitude of a chopine, I fell into the sky. Many summers ago. My parents grieved.

Lovely lyre-tail. Barn swallows conducting avian music with rapid baton-swing wing beats against the low light, chestnut-plumed, of evening. Sky’s breast. Heaven’s vault cloaked in cobalt blue opera mantle. Banker’s barn. Summer job. Eighteen. Sour reek of grass sap staining shirt, pants. Hirundo Rustica.

Backstory. As I write, above my head, in a ceiling fan with a drooping glass belly full of neatly coiled fluorescent intestines, two talcum powder pinecones of white light, gonadal cocoanuts, shower their leprosy in the room.

On the day of my birth I threw my ribcage on over my thoracic organs, buttoned the ribs at the sternum and strode forthright into the light.

Outside, it is morning. The sky is humming. You’ve never seen a sky so blue it hums? “Matter” rhymes with “chatter.” Out of the fenced yards, vistas and avenues of being, something like a baby’s chuckle is rising, the discourse and palaver of universal matter in its infancy.

6/18/2014