Listing
The boat slipped into a hole in the sea,
a deep well of water rising on all sides.
In the moments before
the crashing catastrophe, the quartermaster,
his mind plied
to its own purpose, enumerated all the things
he had set to order:
the scores of boxes of box scores, all precisely pruned from the proceeding day’s paper,
and pressed like
a leaf of the broad-leafed trees of his summers, when the long warm
evenings meandered like fireflies.
The rush of the ocean, the tactile spray of it was the
static of sixties AM over
the frantic calls of the radio.
Snoring, gently snoozing, his father’s glass of scotch half-drained
away would stand
sudden with a triumphant roar-----Safe at home!
father raises his glass.
Another crack of the bat -----Another hero to save our ass!
As he rose, the porch in protest,
as if its old slats might split and snap right in half,
so groaned,
just as the old man groaned, the hoarse sound like a ship
running aground.
The glass, now empty
of scotch, but for ice, ends smashed at his feet:
rally killer.
Ground ball, double play------No hero tonight. Fuck!
The tinkling of
the glass and the ice, the pieces and pieces, was
the sound of defeat.
It was the sound of everything turning
sideways. All the galley’s
neat inventories, one by one sliding
then falling
as outside the porthole the great unbroken horizon finally breaks beneath
the ascending water.
After the first tins go, and the first plates and jars, crashing in shards
go a few more
and then like lemmings, every one
of the quartermaster’s items neatly sorted rises to chaos hurling themselves bodily across the cabin like
rain in a gale,
and everywhere everything exploding.
The scores of scores, the summers’ trees’ broad leaves now brown and brittle
like in the breath of autumn
are swept and scattered.
This poem germinated from a seed of an idea planted by TAL episode 88: Numbers. There was a story about a guy whose hobby was making lists of things. He had lists of his lists. At the time of the story he was in his mid-fifties and had made a list of everything he had done each day since he was ten.
Also of interest was another story in the same episode about these artist who used a public polling firm to figure out what content would make a really popular painting. Turns out the public has really banal taste in art. The result was a landscape with mountains and lake and trees and George Washington (because people like paintings of political people).
They did the same thing again, except with music. The most wanted things added up to a generic-sounding adult contemporary pop song. This time they decide to take the most unwanted aspects and put all those together in a song. The result is an avante-garde curiosity that must be heard to be believed. As I was sitting on the bus, listening to the composer describe why he arranged things as he did, I had to fight to keep from laughing out loud like a crazy person. People want songs that are three to ten minutes long, so he made the song 21 minutes. Rap and opera were voted the least favorite genres of music, so the obvious thing to do was have an opera singer rap. The most unwanted subject matters were cowboys and holidays. The least preferred kind of voices were those of children. So if you can imagine an opera singer rapping about cowboys while a children's choir sings accompaniment, then you're getting the idea. There was also the matter of instrumentation; the most hated instruments were bagpipes, harps, pipe organs--they're all there. I recommend listening to the story first, before checking out the song. If you're an ethical person and want to pay for the songs, you can purchase them here. I found a free copy here.
