Marjan Strojan

I watch them on television; they also show

the breaks between the musical pieces, sometimes.

Now and then I can see a latecomer arriving.

A friendly young lady in black and red shows him

to an empty seat. The latecomer is embarrassed,

he is aware of his back being shown in the homes

of the dwindling number of viewers. His back

feels under attack, but such friendly accompaniment

is not something you reckon with even on

the happiest of evenings: Samuel Barber, Adagio –

music that the death of statesmen has made

indispensable at funerals. I used to go to concerts

every week, Albinoni, Mahler, Barber …

in that order. But that was another concert hall,

another world, no uniformed attendants,

no concert programs looking like commercial

catalogues, but a splendid orchestra, nonetheless.

I was late most of the time. I ran across the park,

unbolted the heavy door, struggled up the stairs

past the cloak-room and stood in front of

the part-open door to the balcony.  Outside

there was a mild spring evening breathing

on my brow, or a sharp winter night and onto them

were beginning to get caught the sounds of

some deeper evenings (and nights) lived through

by the lake, in the small pavilion by the end

of a pier with no mosquitoes to intrude on

the composer’s sadness—the sadness of some

other composer. I would lean on the door-frame,

absorbed in my own evening, in my own sadness

(third such in  succession), properly made up from

waves, from the rustle  of the pines, from far off music

from the dance floor; the two musics blended,

becoming a single one, scented with pine, splashing

on the rocks, running  out the same into silence,

into applause and coughing… My moment has come,

I push open the door and almost invisible

I let myself in into the concert hall. A nod from

my professor of Philosophy, no longer with us.

A little farther forward sits my professor

of Literature, no longer with us. Now when

I see them I myself am no longer there. I disappear

in a moment, but fading out slowly into darkness

like the scenes in old films. No more concert halls,

no musicians. The evenings have died away,

the nights, too. What constitutes our existence,  

what sort of continuity, when things end so finally—

                    once, twice, three times?

He sat on a trunk of a young spruce cut down

one Sunday afternoon—the woods still blue

and trails dug up by wheel-tracks all around

too wet for anyone to pass through.

He liked the tight feel of his shirt, the dell

all quiet and the solemn cool of things

at ease that this first Sunday’s sunny spell

had brought to the belated Spring.

But it wasn’t all woods: from the spruce over the hill

flung into the air resounding with May

a cuckoo’s call plunged through branches at will

like a doe through fern-grass, not calling to stay.

He reached for a cigarette, tapping for matches—

to light up and to listen. He did listen until

all at once there was nothing; the song came in patches,

windblown on the wing of the air that went still.

He looked up the slope; from where snow kept its ground

it stared back at him, too deep for too long

for him to light up, sure that next time around

he’d keep score of the calls of a faraway song.

It’s cold and windy and it’s drizzling. Soaked

and sullen, we hesitate to open our umbrellas.

As soon as we do they turn inside out and try

to flutter away with a shriek. Last time I was

here a grand piano suspended from above

the main entrance was opening up with a sharp

rattle like a great mechanical butterfly, uttering

clanky music at incomprehensible intervals as

it descended upon our heads. Then followed

a lecture in which it was said that only a thin

layer of reality still separates us from seeing

our instantaneous present artfully reproduced

a fraction of an instant before it happens. Somebody

from the audience argued back that such a thing

had already been tried (he didn’t say where),

and that MoMA had long ago obtained for its

collection some of the finer examples of the genre,

with fatal results. Further polemics have led us

to believe that all portrait painting renders

its subjects stranded in that same position, though

one can as well reverse the argument and refer to

a case at the National Gallery, where the visitors

to the room of Rembrandt’s self-portraits fell ill

with an intense feeling of being pursued from

one corner of the room to another by twenty-two

pairs of identical eyes before being silently,

unaffectedly, attentively, roguishly etc. escorted

through the door, and the compensation claims

of the afflicted personnel had, on all levels, gone

on for ages. Come wind, come rain, people would

come to see anything. Finally, the smell hit us.

Here we were in a white, luminous hall squarely

divided into large containers filled up with naphtha,

looking down into a speckless black mirror of

the architecture above, which, slightly curved, also

contained you, but in far deeper, more perfect

outlines than your usual three-dimensional image,

which half an hour earlier had worked its way out

through the crowd and not yet fully awake had made

love to your wife in the small hours of the morning.