St. Matthew Passion

Put out my eyes, and I can see you still.
— Rilke

I try to pull away, but can't,
My coat drawn halfway on and hanging
Crosswise in the back,

The empty sleeve fallen aslant,
Brushing the floor — I have to leave,
It's time, I've set

The afternoon aside for "taking care
Of things" — my scribbled lists
Of valueless, inconsequential errands,

Rounds of chores, and unavailing tasks
I can't put off, all things forgotten
Instantly as soon as taken care of.

But haunting me if left undone.
I have to leave. But when I try
To make my hand reach for the door,

It doesn't move. As if it isn't able to.
As if I had forgotten you, Jerusalem.
As if I could. Instead I stand

Arrested at the door, held in abeyance
By the music I left on.
Erbarme dich.

A rising minor sixth unseals the sound.
The violin, engulfed
By what has happened, brings the room

Into another state of being. A seventh sense.
Its aria, heart-crucifying, brief,
Is trying to extend

A wordless vocal line.
As if the violin caught sight
Of bonfire-lit Jerusalem,

A small midnight procession,
Roiling torches, shouted Greek.
The sight of Jesus, bound, and shoved ahead.

The sight of Peter, trailing far behind.
Then halted in the dark,
Because we cannot lift our feet or set them down again

Without the help — of God — a sound
As if the violin has seen
Nothing as sad in all of Israel,

Even with Jesus fallen on his knees —
Nothing as sad in Israel as the sight
Of Peter, from afar off, following.

I sense the room behind me,
Holding still, engrossed,
As if the room is listening

Because the brushwork of the bow
Is given over to the darkest
Beauty that b minor ever touched,

Intent on finding, fastening, F# to D,
In tensile gossamer,
As if the heart's-leap

Of a rising minor sixth
Could be enough to mend
What's happened here.

A leavetaking that no one
Would have wished for,
Wanted, willed.

The Passion's flutes, which shrilled with malice,
Taunting Peter at the bonfire
In the palace courtyard, suddenly are stilled,

Gone dark, cut off, and lowered
In the players' hands
Because they've seen that he

Went out and wept most bitterly.
Peter, who said an hour ago that he
"Would die for him." But now —

But now remembering the store
That Jesus set in him.
That valuing.

Stockstill and lowering my coat
Out of respect because I'm standing
In the presence

Of his wild tribulation, while the violin
Consents to shoulder this,
To stay with him, to take it on,

As being all the violin can do.
But what is the worth the doing,
Given this.

Given that the tower Peter claimed
That he would build
Has come to nothing

But a scattering of massive, half-cut
Blocks of stone
Abandoned on a quarry floor.

Only enough for building half a tower.
The other blocks he needs
Still hidden, uncut in the cliffs.

Yet he can see that his messiah has begun
To climb a tower
He built himself, to climb alone.

The Passion-sound, from balcony to balcony,
From Thomaskirche to here:
But if my love for you could only help —

I have to leave. Instead I stand stockstill,
As if I'm physically unable
Not to hear it to the end.

As if there's nothing I can do
But stand and listen
To a rising-falling in the treble clef.

As if there's nothing left on earth
For me to do but stand and listen.
As if listening could help.

Herzliebster Jesu

The fairest order in the world is but a heap of random sweepings.
— Heraclitus

Even as a child, I saw the prism
Of b minor lying broken in the staves
Of the chorale,

Herzliebster Jesu, was hast Du verbrochen? —
A child's question, trying to deduce
The shape and angles

Of a shattered crystal prism
From a heap of splinters
Shining in plain sight —

What has He ever done, what trespass,
What transgression — I saw
The accidental sharps'

Jagged, chromatic dissonance
Embedded in the words
Beneath the black light

Of the ultraviolet harmonies
Scanning the question in the hymn,
Seeking a trace, a trace — discovering

Only the presence
Of the heart's blood shed at death —
I stood with them, a child

Among the congregation risen to its feet,
Risen as one, acknowledging
Music beyond the reach of ritual,

All standing in the beauty
Of the dark, blood-smeared chorales,
The music taken up, experienced, felt

In the first-person singular and plural
By a gathering in memory
Of the savage damage

To a human heart, where dissonances
Tear the staves apart,
And yet major to minor cleaves

Among the keys' black signatures
Of intimate compassion —
I stood with them among

Suspended intervals, augmented sixths,
Descending minor thirds, and saw
Colors appearing on the wall —

Harmonic changes visible,
Familiar, strange, where Bach
Had rearranged the spectral order

Of the colors, part by part,
To underscore that All is changed —
Though little did I know

That all was as it was,
Or know the world has always been
The way it is, or know

People have always done
What people do — I didn't know —
I only knew

Creation as the predicate
Of pre-existent love, and knew of love
As a conclusion long ago foregone —

I only knew unbroken bonds
The way the colors cleave magnetically,
Both fused and torn apart,

And only there so clearly without volume,
Mass, or tangibility.
Yet not illusion. Not illusory.

"The kingdom isn't something you can see,
Or gesture toward, to say
It's here — or here —"

Spectral — except I felt the weight
Of C#, pausing in the tenor line,
Grow palpable,

A shadow in my chest
That gathered mass and heft and edge
As if the accidental sharp

Were driven clear into the pulmonary cavity
At Golgotha, then wrenched back
Like a spear —

What trespass, what transgression — a sharp
Existing only in the weightless harmonies,
Transpiercingly

Reflecting light above the word
For "misdeed" — Missetaten —
Finding me the way

A splinter that I've searched for, couldn't find,
And gradually had forgotten,
Pierces me.

Bethany

Du lieber Heiland du/ Buss und Reu

When all that we would give remains ungiven —
Then f# minor, flutes,
And second thoughts

Whose slowing steps grow heavy, heavier,
Among wind-carried particles
Of myrrh scattered across

The threshold of a room
To which a pair of flutes returns
And touches down,

Tugged down by gravity
From veering altitudes
And swooping heights

Of righteous accusation, shrill rebuke —
The flutes, who only live
On borrowed breaths,

Are touching down with aching steps,
Brought back to earth,
Brought down

By the compression-depth and shock
Of unforeseen departure. His.
An alto voice appears

Amid the circling of wordless flutes,
To speak for them,
To offer their duet,

With shamed remorse and bitter rue,
As a belated gift —
Requital — recompense

For how they'd blindly witnessed,
Blindly missed,
What Jesus thought

The world was worth,
One moment
At modest gathering

Among unvalued persons
In a leper's house, in Bethany,
And Jesus seated. Soon to be unseated.

His men, standing around him,
Having grown
So used to Jesus' poverty

They overlooked it, couldn't see
That there was anything
On earth that Jesus needed.

A waste, they said, by which they meant,
Wasted on him,
Excoriating her, the woman

Who had seen in him that love
Without which life is little more
Than empty errands,

Rounds of endless chores.
Burdens lifted up,
And set back down —

The woman who had seen
The prodigality of the Creation
Pouring out around them

Where they stood — the kingdom,
Profligate, and present
In the room,

And in its midst,
His royal destitution.
For which she broke the seal

On her jar, and poured an overflow
Of fragrance in her palms
To press it to his hair.

And Jesus, breathing in the scent
Of burial spices,
Aloes mixed with myrrh,

Could see an empty shelf of rock,
A vacant shroud,
A quadrangle of blue

That opened out onto the scent
Of scattered boulders,
Ancient olive trees.

The petrichor of opened earth
Beneath a gardener's rake at 6 a.m.
The shining blur

Of lightning-scrubbed, limestone Jerusalem.
And Magdalene approaching, unaware
That he already stood awaiting her.