Five-Finger Exercises
by Charlotte Appleton
Rough Sonnets for Alain Lefevre, concert pianist and composer, practising; Voula, Athens 5
December 1999.
"Is this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
...Ah Helen! Thy lips suck forth my soul!"
John Marlowe, Dr. Faustus. (A verse drama).
I
The coffee machine is boiling and the horizon
Is widening with distance and vision and clouds, and composing
Storms for our dreams from this height, at the end of the season
And century of our songs, the young white dog dozing
And listening to the enchanter, whose polished fingers
Tickle the keys, puppy's cocked ears, piano piano;
Softly softly the gods come, a wild muse who lingers
To dance in the light with the feet of the rhythm, rallentando
As he mutters in French neat expletives of animal cadence
For symphonic magic which suddenly takes a wrong turn
About, as the goddess goes out at the mention of nonsense
And lamps of the mind are extinguished, refusing to burn
Till coffee is poured, and the bitterness opens a seam
Of silver in silence, that knits up the break in the theme.
II
We sit in the glass tower, the high place, and watch the steel ships
Pass through the straits, the narrows, where monsters have lurked
And battles been won, the slaves' backs red, lashed by the whips
Of merciless drivers, the catapults heaving fire arced
From vessel to vessel close-ranged. With stylus and wax
The scribe sat observing, recording, from these very hills
The fate of this continent, Europe, (the bleeding slaves' backs),
The navies of rote-learning Persia, the contest of wills,
The Greek triremes spreading out, working on order and maths,
Circling the despots' fleets, distance related to time,
The numberless ships of the Orient blocked in their paths
And trapped by the intellect, burnt to the waterline, (scream
After scream of the sailors who jumped into naptha, on fire
As slaves kept on rowing and dying, to end the great war).
III
We sit here at the heart of that dark sea,
That wine-dark sea that Homer, who was blind
Made vivid in his Iliad, Odyssey
Which still has power to move, since Helen's kind
Still keep a space of calm when Balkan wars
Rage Troy-like all around, when consequence
Is ever more important, when lust flares
For nations' rape, the sack of innocence
A pillage for the eye, for videotape
And live transmission to the truly wired
Who live for new sensation and escape
From that reality the Greeks aspired
To understand, defend, and stimulate;
The bare, essential and awakened state.
IV
The naked mind, in music and in verse
Approaches an exposure which the eye
Cannot bring out in paint, or yet rehearse
In marble horses or a roiling sea
Which has no scent or salt, in some old film.
What is suggested merely, gains thereby
And deepest feeling needs most space to whelm;
Holst's planets are not seen, yet fill the sky,
Whilst Marlowe's Helen charms us with her face
Though she is spirit and cannot be touched.
The myriad pictures in a gallery's space
All look but cannot see or speak, bewitched
By two dimensions when a single one
Can wake the dead and give fresh life to stone.
V
He is the voice and the interpreter,
The sudden flesh for thousands spirited
Away, yet with us now when his hands stir
Upon those ivory keys. The centuries' dead
Are more alive in him than in themselves,
For he renews them in his singing head
And lights the shadows where the lost soul delves
In search of rebirth where the damned have led
Long years in limbo. Where the harpies feed,
He goes, equipped with scores, to beat out sense,
And where the dreamer sleeps, he plants a seed
Which germinates a star, and difference,
So, wakening to others, we all see
Through music, what a place this world can be.
VI
Essence and substance; how can substance be
Born of bright essence, plasma energy?
To know, go nuclear; in the blinding one
The many visible are made, our sun,
Your day, their vague assumptions, every place
And half-life surges out from a small space,
Big bang, small stutter, just a lame excuse
For pulsing all-in-nothing. Sight's no use,
So metaphor will have to do, love cools
And takes new shape as children, as fresh fools
Who have to learn, from what they see and hear
The possible exception of next year,
The facts of life and death, that we depart
This earth but may return in forms of art.
Copyright © Charlotte Appleton 2003
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