ANIMAL MELODIES

Animals         deep in our hearts      deep in our arts

        I move along the galloping pack      It is said that

rats that are exposed early to music of Schoenberg & Mozart

    show a strong liking in later life for other music by the

composer that they were raised on & reject the composer

      that they were not raised on         I have become

  accustomed to these Gregorian chants of winter

Clouds      foggy       I am an animal of antiquity     as gentle

    as Oliver Twist     I have become attached umbilically 

to the mellow-minimalistic piano-melodies in this room's

    impregnable coma         You too could be spoiled by

the hypnotic expansion      eking varicolored spotlights

    where music attempts to shear the air here       Once the music

 has ended it can still be heard      I hear it now

     Satie's tunes (his fingers were like a Mother's affection)

      

I could bounce upward, downward, in a communal pool

showing off my spiritual freedom       I look back to

see if the compact disc had actually ended          It had         I turn

around, amazed, still able to hear the soft keys playing

delicately       My ears & mind prodded by music's

unending proboscis         Animals in our arts       that's

what I said          The artist & mystics of the early & middle

Stone Ages watched animals, modeled animals, drew

animals, dreamed of animals            They had thought

that they themselves had become animals ...

friends, competitors, victims          In the late sixtees

hippies became polychromatic lizards           Occidental

life           nonplussing the globe          (a rigid goosing)

O tempora! O mores!          What of these incunabulas?

     a peeled pellicle      passes into oblivion

I delight in every recall           If my animal-dialogue

becomes "mindless revolutionary jargon"

will you consider me oblique & shrewd like some

sapped arch-conspirator?       At least I'm eye

-filling like dusty gypsum hills before a 

raging blizzard            It's a matter of the face

What's the matter?    What's "the" matter?     What's "matter"? 

Battered by unconvenable weight of sang-froid 

Outside      slick rain-swept surfaces         Inside    animals

amidst animals          An artistry that is capable of 

touching anyone who listens        archiving the pearl

in one's heart