Morning Music

After Emmanuel de Witte

I

The distinctive quality of the mysterious

Is a preciseness to which we are not accustomed:

A room, perhaps, without furniture,

Yet sufficiently detailed to break the fascination

Of any potential for narration.

It was through training and exercise

That we learned to think of mild spring nights,

And of green fields, standing off to one side,

Glimpsed through a circle of tall trees.

It began with interiors, whose logic of assemblage

Encouraged a concentration on mechanical things,

On a remembering that became a matter of

A particular shade of gold, rooms opening into other

rooms

According to a plan whose ideal indifference

Fostered a kind of elated idleness. The music was there

To suggest the possibility of other combinations,

To be found in a place designated next-to-last.

During storms, we shut the curtains

And slept in the dark, imagining a separation

From the residential quarters in the rear.

u

It was possible to go farther than we had intended.

We passed through the gardens and waited in the rain

In the pavilion behind the summer house,

Where once the orchestra's discords

Had relaxed and come undone into harmony.

The city below was purposeful,

Partially obscured by the blue hills.

We told ourselves that if this were important,

So might something else be,

That perhaps this was not important at all,

And we had missed what we were looking for.

The roads led out of town, into the farmland,

Past the junctions, where nothing was disclosed.

In the fall, a certain mildness settled in the birch trees,

And we felt a slippage at the heart of things.

There were more roses than in the spring,

Growing beside the harbors where we went at nightfall

To watch the sailors come to store their riggings

Against the effects of the night air.

u

The language of desire is not unmediated,

But comes to us from a place that is hard

And not our own. There are times

On these long summer mornings

When it seems that everything we could possibly say or

feel

Has been said or felt before, and left légèrement déformé,

So that our only interest is to restore the originals. For

now,

There is this stream, clinging to this hillside,

In a relationship that, although close,

Remains unspecific. Where the water pools,

The grass smells as if it should be blue.

You have been here before, or someplace like it

(It does not matter exactly), when it was dark,

And the lights were coming on for the cyclists

Along the low wall where the women walked on holidays.

No effort of disengagement will do.

The simultaneity of the whole

Is available to reverse or qualify any conclusions.

The afternoons involved consist of interruption,

breakdown,

With images of night and distant travel,

Systems of romance conducted in specific autumn weather

Of fog and cold mornings and gray brick buildings

With high windows covered by frost.

IV

The light from the side yard falls across the rows

Left by the mowers, and drifts in the caladiums

Behind the rock garden where so much happened.

I tell you this to remind you of the possibilities of

movement,

As on those mornings when the weather changed,

And something-a particular shade of green, perhaps-

Seemed to be gone. Even then,

There were days completely without wind.

It is not a matter of retraction.

The momentum established is irreversible

So that nothing can be uninvented.

Only the obvious plot was wrong,

Starting from a chance remark about a fortune

And the light in the second floor window

Coming from your room. Nothing will be left out.

Everything will be included, except the powerful and

controlling,

Which will have to be omitted in the final drafts

When we have learned the technique

Of eliding the anecdotal material altogether.

We will work together on versions of endings

That will take account of the aunt's arrival in the

courtyard

And the grandfather's walks down the yard to the golf

course

Summer evenings after dinner. All of this may involve

A certain redistribution, a new recognition

Of frames and windows and musical instruments

And the intervals between them. Even now

The afternoons anticipate more than they claim to,

Obsessed with those events that come accompanied

By methods of retrieval, imagining water

Lying all around in the darkness, with roads

Lined with stone lanterns, leading up to it through the

woods.

No amount of thinking can make this necessary,

Unless joined by a refusal to be possessive

And a sense of new intimacies

That are entirely a matter of tone.

I would have liked for this to have been warmer,

To have been more than a question of arranging

The objects that surround us, complicated and unreliable.

There is no turning back. One day it will be written, the

history

Of our obscurity, with transcriptions

Of our wonderment before the pine trees

Standing in a clearing that was not quite unfamiliar.

And then, I (or someone else) may ask you

To think of men who sailed to the middle of a lake

And fired off cannons, for the pleasure of the echoes

That returned to them, without regard for their action

Or for how vulnerable it must have been;

But only for the water, and the sound of the ferries,

And the lights on the hillside

Where the carnival was; and for their days,

Which, when the rain held off till evening,

Were cold, but sufficiently clear.