The Mystery of a Fallen God Is the Story of Man’s Soul

Where Baroque exclaims and sighs,

Classicism strives to pronounce

a Moira’s stern, precise verdict

as by a hand so from a mind

neither of which yields to doubt

and where a pure, perfect line

that goes straight returns to bite

the curve in shame into its opulent butt.

Classic is the chilly, aloof detachment

that packed Phoebe of its marble heart

away from the abandon and the excess

of the Baroque—Bacchic drunken dark.

But there goes a story that used to hold

that it was Apollo himself above all

who was once upon a time much long

expelled from heaven to become a slave.

Because of a hyacinth and the death

from a God to which it was bound.

Thus God became a slave and less

than man for mankind’s certain types.

But how can heaven—our heaven be

without its own supreme sun?

And is it then that sunless Baroque sky

a world of God—Apollo overturned

and fallen—like Phaethon, his own son,

and to be reborn back like tipsy Bacchus,

both to a woman and from a godly thigh?

Only to fall in love—in love madly

for a nymph, a woman, a love sought

and denied—till one gets one’s laurel,

back one’s immortal soul through art

or love for a song and faith and patience

composed as a poem, a sonnet perhaps,

a new little sun (if words can be made to light)

—from Hades plucked and fingered, strummed,

on a lyre’s Moon-like horns and scooped-out shell

in a style and a melody that holds on back to beauty

rendered by death-and-time-defying memory

both visible and transparent—just like Calliope,

Ouverture, Suite No. 2 for strung harpsichord—

by Johann Caspar Fisher, my old countryman

from the town of Krásno in the Slavkov Woods.

For if the day is like a lamp that helps us read

what a book of time writes and reads from up close,

it is the night that grows to our darkened gaze

the universe far away, distances, deep and vast,

once again fresh perceived and divinely eloquent

out of the daytime blanks, blue or earthly gray.

And just like the blue of the sky is not a color

if unto another it doesn‘t rub or impart itself,

so neither art nor a soul is true or potent

when, transforming, they themselves wouldn‘t last.

If Bacchus gives a beat, Apollo then yields a tact.

If Bacchus is grandiose and dark and Baroque–

like a stone of light, a pearl warped, malformed

to wet and file the sound board of your appetite

or to pipe and lead your kissing breath to a Syrinx cry,

then Apollo, the Classicist, is a price to Justice

for the devil paid—in decorum and reticence

that hold the fire and trot the cadre’s so(m)ber line.

In accordance with the cliché that what is held

and deprived is bound to turn in and double

in time its buried seed that brings to view

a whole new symmetry and sight

from the Bacchic worldly ruts and tries—

when, inside us, turns a cosmic night

on its newly undraped living lights.

Unless it all is once more a romance

where the God of Lucid Light

or the God of Winding Vine

remains a God—that’s fallen,

fallen deep—up into love.

Even beyond grave and life.

In a perfect Heaven’s match

between a call of Siren

and a Mozart or a Bach,

in divine beauty sunk

no less than up

or even past—

our ears grown

completely musical.