At Tower Records

Photo from Wikimedia

by Brett Rutherford

 It was one of those years
when Manhattan shone
not white with diamonds
but lurid crimson, Masque
of the Red Death, tombs
filling as fast as luxury
apartments. A year

 of averted gazes when
a particular face flashed
eyes you thought you knew
but that deathly pallor,
sunken cheeks, unsteady
gait made you look away,

 that year you read
obituaries first, that year
you could not count
on two hands the friends
you lost. One Sunday,

 lost in my thoughts
at the cutout record bins
of Tower Records
(the classical annex of course),
in quest of Handel operas
no one had sung since
Handel’s own day, or some
obscure Russian symphonist

 I saw a man whom no one saw,
or everyone pretended not
to see. Rail-thin in shabby clothes,
torn sneakers, he hurried
from bin to bin, all bent
on the big boxes: Wagner’s Ring
(Furtwangler and Solti, no less),
one each of all the Verdi greats,
a heap of Sutherland and Sills
in all the bel canto must-haves.

 The albums piled
up to his chin, he tottered,
shambled, and pulled himself
to the counter. A few in line
gave way; others behind
pulled back at the sight
of the tell-tale lesions
upon his neck and arms.

 He paid cash. It was all
he could do to carry
the heap of albums away.
No one spoke. Eyes turned
so as not to watch
as he passed the store’s
long windows, to where
a waiting cab, trunk
open, swallowed up
the opera horde
and its new owner.

 We turned back,
each and all,
to our searches.
I knew too well
what this was about.
He had come into
a little money, his life
insurance cashed in,
most likely, and by god,
he was going to die
owning every damn opera
he had ever wanted.

 He would go out like a diva.

 

Opera Sundays

by Brett Rutherford

Sundays we flock to the alley lane
where the Manfredis live. Grandma
Manfredi, who speak-a no English,
defies the Blue Laws and sells us
from the cool shadow of cellar door,
soda pop in 16-ounce bottles. We hand
her quarters and dimes. A half-dollar,
heavy and mint-new shiny, alarms her.
When she counts to make change,
we giggle and stamp feet impatiently.
"That's a five," she says, "and a five,"
and then her eyes move over and down
an imagined arithmetic lesson. "No!"
we shout when she counts it wrong,
and she starts all over again, down
and over in her nonexistent abacus.

While most run off
with soda and straw, I linger,
pass by the basement window
where Signor Manfredi plays
his antique big-horn Victrola.
I listen, rapt, as Caruso sings
Vesti la giubba over and over,
the high-arced aria ending
with the heart-break sobbing
of the jilted clown. Each time
he lifts the needle and arm
to restart the record, Signor
Manfredi himself is sobbing.

Ridi, Pagliacci!

Around the run-down house's
other side, above the arbor
festooned with ripening grapes
the buxom Mrs. Manfredi,
Sophia Loren beautiful,
above a geranium window-box
pretends to read, and leans
into the sunrays to show herself,

as in the window across from her,
a shirtless young man
with another Victrola plays Gigli
in the seductive serenade
that only Lola understands
as Cavalleria Rusticana unfolds
its lurid infidelities. He mouths
the words and stares and stares
at Mrs. Manfredi.

She smiles and blushes. The chest
of the shirtless man swells
as he would have her believe
his mouth and lungs were singing.

His eyes dart at her.
The clown in the basement
suspects nothing, he seems to say,
as he goes back to the Victrola
and starts the serenade anew.

Sunday afternoon,
as every Italian knows,
is for opera.

Life Without Siegfried

     Thoughts many years ago while hearing Georg Solti
     and The Chicago Symphony perform Act III
     Of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung in concert

1
Here walks young Siegfried by the Rhine,
armed with a Ring the old gods lost,
curled in a fist, that ancient gold,
its sun-gut power crushed to grams
of portable might.
This hero, half-awake,
does not yet know himself.
He has lived among bears and evil dwarfs.
He knows not what power means,
nor in his brazen youth believes
the Rheingold curse’s warning.
As the nixies taunt him, he almost hurls
the thing into the river — let them have it;
it’s neither good for food or fighting —
but he yields instead, self-irked
to danger’s lure — his strong arms
enjoy a good battle. He savors fear
as though the its loss would soften him.
He will keep the Ring, to see what happens.

Already you are drugged, young man:
the Tarnhelm poison pours mercury
across your eyes, blinds you to envy
and to those who tread along behind you.
You love the hunt, the running ardent life;
sun-gilded trinkets are nothing to you
since you eat from the nut-trees and hunt-fire.
You are proud of your strength, your certitude 
oblivious to oaths of greed and lust,
the lure of pleasure the ends with knife-thrust.

As music soars, some listeners both hear
and see. Others have obsidian, dead eyes,
inverted smiles frozen in Republican hauteur,
Mrs. and Mr. Gibichung in furs and wingtips.
She has done nothing to harm anyone.
He has perhaps done a great deal to a great many.
The thin and tender line between cynic 
and murderer: one says no heroes live;
the others makes sure all heroes are killed.

This opera is not for its audience. It dwells
in a realm of ideas, forms crystallized
in words sung, spun upon leitmotivs
that make all words much more than their sum. 
Siegfried, you do not know
you are being played through, lived through,
a thousands voyeurs and auditors engaged
in your triumph and love and loss.

At the last, pathetic youth,
when your eyes are cleansed by a traitorous cup, 
when you at last remember everything,
you see how Love and Art are yours,
how you were tricked into giving them away
to fools; the Love you awakened
sent to warm the glutton crowds,
Brunnhilde cast to Mrs and Mr Gibichung,
never to grace your own barren hearth.


Then at the surge, when wings of worth
flap with your just demand,
you are just as suddenly slain.
Your terminus erupts in raven wings
and the All-Father who could have saved you
does nothing. One funeral beat
will serve for all. Everything must fall.

2
Now proud Brunnhilde,

the spiteful demi-goddess, comes,
armed with her timeless grace.
Whom have you killed? she asks
He brought the sun to your side,
you heard his songs, took me,
his freely given gift, in vain.
Come, light the pyre, indeed!
Burn all the souls in whom the hero died,
see if the withering youth in your breast
falls too, like his, when the world
envelops darkness for an age.
His loss has cost you me:
I’ll be no muse for coward bards.
All art and song I strip from you.
Birds even shall be dumb.
Life without Siegfried
must teach you what you have lost.

There burns the maiden Art:
museums blaze, books fall
as leaves, a flaming trumpet
melts, and in the wake
no hearth on earth shall glow again.

The floods of time and folly
bear off the Ring, while gods
who thought themselves undying
turn to dust in an eye-blink.
Now humankind will worship
a wimp’s god, a bloody thorn,
a bleating lamb, a sigil.

Go to the forest black, go where
no church steeple blights horizon.
Stand there, and on a breeze you hear
Brunnhilde’s hymn
changelessly re-sung:
to have lived, or died,
in the love of the human best
is great, and answerless.

[Revised May 2019]