MUSIC FOR THE CROSSING Poem by Stefan Hertmans

1
. . . pearly trail of a snail
Or grit of trampled glass . . .

Eugenio Montale



How I found a very small snail
Crossing the hallway:
The "external coincidences which
Determine a thing's origin".
Glenn Gould played Hindemith sonatas.
Nothing prescribing restriction
Remained unaffected, unchallenged.
In the meantime the snail had
Drawn a silvery trail across marble.
Blackly, its own discovery lay mirrored
In the reflection of the garden
Which it had exchanged for stones.

Hindemith never took chances,
Except maybe this one: to choose for
That unassailable quiet in a time
Full of wind and nazi plague, to
Reflectingly write sonatas while
Elsewhere blood colours the red flags
Redder, nomads scrub pavements,
Feeble breaths transatlantically
Go underground in another ghetto.
The three sonatas for piano
Seem to have been written in the
"tempo of a very slow march":
an army creeping over the Alps
draws a snail's trail across Europe
while Der Pauli sees mirrors in
the great lakes, reflection as
negation of death, a black score
under which eel and wagfish
quiver in granite liquid.


2

Characteristically, snails have the weakness
Of not recognizing, not even seeing their enemies,
They're hardly aware life is vulnerable
Without any hair or house.
A whimpering child doesn't hear
How the rustling already betrays
The chop of sharp knives in the music
Of the spheres;
The tip of a shoe now approaches
The trail, the march is slowly driven back
Into its beat, like a marche funèbre.
Marble tiles will not allow movement
Forever, even though a hallway sometimes
Looks like fordable rivers and each
Time I step into them I'm different.
This too is a game with tonalities,
Tiles look like keys and nothing
That beforehand could be checked
On a magic diapason, is certain.

While polishing the shaped skins
My Uncle Maurice, a leather merchant
In a high and gloomy house, often
Argued that the tuning of memory
Was a matter of two instruments:
One that he called fleetingness,
The other obsession.
He dipped biscuits in his tea,
On Sunday mornings went to the tiny
Graveyard at Saint-Blasius-Boekel
And had a strange adoration
Of my mother, especially when she
Played the piano.


3

With Hindemith however, nothing's as certain
As the trail you have forgotten.
The one hand looks for the other, finds
It a few seconds before the tyranny
Of the chords drives it on;
Sometimes they look like musical lobsters,
Twins risking a rondo, sometimes
The one mounts the other
For a moment, even though making love
On marble keyboards isn't really
Everyone's idea of lebhaft, but look,
It can't always be contrapuntal.

Webern was more fond af canons,
Hindemith played it like a fugue,
Tonal so to speak, cunning and yet
Banal - ideology's not like cultivating
A slime trail on a stony floor.

Yet afterwards the hands lie gasping
For breath, dreaming or drowsy.
At worst, they're waiting for a tide
That won't come back. Outside, there
Are voices in the hallway, pending in
The air of empty streets, one sometimes
Calls this history - a cave where
Meyerbeer plays with catapults.


4

My snail promises me, if only
For a moment, an eternal comeback -
Miraculously, the circle of its trail
Has now encorporated my heel, my feet
Become scorpions, and inside this circle
All that is left to me is staring
At my own sting.

How can I get out of this?
This search for reflecting fugues,
Retrograde motion, dual motives
And the coolness of this hallway:
It avails to nothing.

There's no night long enough
To bring that snail back to me,
Or to check how on earth it landed
So far from the garden, on this mirror.

I must still learn to listen, hold
My breath, eliminate thought and learn
To hear voices wrenching themselves past
Each other in their slippery substance.

What happens when the winds lie down:
Absence fills the homecomer
With motion,
He takes chance places for
His niche, is indifferent to
Solid matter, sometimes writes
That voices are sourdough and
Then again praises the mind.


5

A snail that suddenly appears to have
Auricles: protrusions changing into
Antennae, a small snout unexpectedly
Transforming itself into a caricature,
And before I understand, it starts
To yell, slippery, unbearably high
And sharp, in a German accent that
Is undeniable: Love thy Destiny!
So let your ears at the inside
Of your body, amplified a thousand
Times, make the most of space
And auditory nerve, then grow
Your own cave near your temples,
Let the shadows report themselves
At the nearest office -
A border crossing to atonal regions
Where everyone sings fifteen variations
Of his own first name.

Thus Igor played his own hand
In these sonatas (and this too
Is a quote that will get me no
Further, since everything will
Wipe out something else, until
The mind, as a retrogade motion,
Returns to a tombstone's marble).

But for now, let's not leave this snail
Here misunderstood, even if its form
Can only be scraped from the keys
With great difficulty. It's just
The small body has become formless,
The silver trail keeps showing up
On the black mirror of its origin.
And already, a strange key creaks
In the lock, in three-four time
The song leaps over a low wall and
Disappears without making a sound:
Beware of what you know.

Old harmonies, forgotten safety.
Unhindered a man walks through border
Crossings, in search of snow and poems.


6

All this had just, incessantly, begun
When this snail interrupted my ways
And crossed from left to right.
Gould still played Hindemith,
Flies landed in yawning mouths,
History sneaked into the detergent
With which I'll scrub the tiles next.
A man of the midway, of compromises,
A cosy family, a child that leapt
Over a wall and disappeared
In a camp for Jews, musique
D'ameublement in the background,
A trace of Igor and his loved ones.
The culprits will be publicly
Executed, later.
Only black-and-white contrasts remain,
Recollections of fire and mud.

A man with a slightly balding skull
Slips through the meshes in the net.
Along the way, he rears antennae.
Not he but those who look for him
Are looking for some trails:
Not given away, not reported,
Just charged with leaving
A trail on an orphic mirror.

Say Pauley good night,
Clench the fists between two octaves,
Increase each distance by its opposite,
Greet the triton like a sea god
And pray that all snails resurrect
In the breakers, as once was promised
To the souls - when they didn't exist yet.

Gould suddenly plays Hindemith,
I find a snail on a tiled floor
That never remains its mirroring self
And I step into it, for the first time.