Cover

That side of the house is cold because of the sun. It shines on the roses out back. In the kitchen you can stand on your toes and see him in the the garden, gently pruning, turning the blossoms this way and that. Otherwise they won't grow, she says, or at least not be so pretty. I don't really understand how it works, she says, and takes the warm bread out of the oven.

The electric blanket is because of the bedroom on the cold side. You have to shut the door because of her snoring, so the rest of the house can't share the warmth. In the city they didn't have the extra space, but now we can take turns visiting. There is a strange odor when the blanket heats up in the cold room, but it isn't dangerous.

Don't we take care of you, he says. He is not afraid of bees. I don't go near the roses. They are fragrant in the light, tied to their stakes.

In the living room we watch TV, the Clancy Brothers on Johnny Carson. Past bedtime, she says. Don't tell your folks, he says. The room is warm and rich, bread and whiskey and pipe tobacco. His smile, her gentle early dozing. The song from the old country. The national anthem.

I don't know how to refuse the electric blanket's oppressive, heavy spell. I unplug it in the dark, secretly, to spare their feelings, but of course by then it is too late.

dkz

Rheinlegendchen

Tonight I sat in the dark as Stephen Gould, Christian Thielemann, and the Vienna Phil brought the Forging Song to brilliant life. Fire flamed up and flickered in the orchestra, metal glared, the maestro coolly held the forces in hand so that the tenor could ride the waves with gusto. "Ho hei!" sings the tenor, while hammering away at the newly forged Nothung, the sheer joy and effort of his work taking him beyond language into pure music.

Wagner brings out the hammers when there's work to be done. Rheingold's Donner (Thor, really, but in this story a much less awesome god than Wotan), eager to dispel the confusion left by Alberich's curse, gathers the winds to him with a "Heda, hedo" before he deals his thunderous Schlag. In the second act of Meistersinger, Hans Sachs  is also moved to nonsense syllables and hammer blows as he tries to take care of business. "Jerum, jerum, hallo hallo he!" he cries, whatever that means, slogging away over a pair of shoes and drowning out a troublesome rival. 

The act of working itself lifts the characters out of their lengthy Wagnerian discussions into an act rhythmic, repetitive, and purely melodic, unbound by syntax and meaning. The exertions of labor seek and find their release. Some of Wagner's characters are part magical, pure expressions of nature, and their voices leave human hammerstrikes behind to dwell in a deep world of mysterious meanings. Their syllables bear no explanation, nor do they need one. The Rheinmaidens in the water, the Valkyries in the air call to us as the birds or the wind called to us in childhood, when we could still understand everything. Weia, wala, heia, hoyotoho. Siegfried will later drink dragon's blood and understand the woodbird's speech, but in the Forging Song he is on his way, a lumbering, powerful bird himself with his wordless song. 

Good, honest, simple work, the way to bliss, one seamlessly connected to the other. It is that easy...until the neighbors spill out into the chaotic street, until you put in on the wrong shore. Because, legends teach us, beauty and peril dwell together, the search will lead you astray, and dark oblivion will mask itself in a friend's chalice or a sweet song. The pull of desire, the gleam of the gold - are these the real treasure, found at last? Is it your true love calling to you, or is it Lorelei?

Where is your wisdom? 

The strong work of rowing the boat slows and calms to a gentle rocking. It feels so like the good release after honest exertion. Is it not the same, have you not earned it? You notice your own face reflected in the waves, more beautiful than ever.

Stay with me. Whose voice calls you?

The oars are idle at your side. Can you still decide to pick them up again? 

Halb zog sie ihn, halb sank er hin. 

Oh, Lorelei will take you down to the bottom of the river, and you will want to go.

Wehe, wehe. 

Nights like these, in the darkened theater, the Rhein swirls up at me from out of the orchestra pit, takes me, drowns me. I know it's not Lorelei, because I know her song. I'll never take the journey without sharpening my gaze into the blackness, scanning the shore for danger. But the journey, yes, absolutely, above all things: for the navigation, for the work, for the wordless joy.

Weia, leia, hei ha. 

dkz

3 years

Ring, November 1

Vollendet das ewige Werk.


Now that we are building our own little Valhalla out in Texas, I have a moment of kinship with Wotan as he intones these words tonight. I hear his sentence mundane and literal for the first time, the stress and strain and hope and ambition involved in creating a castle. Of course, the giants are the ones doing the labor, and there arises the complicated question of ownership. What did you do, and what do you believe you have earned? Wotan and the giants each demand, offer, and accept unreasonable reward, reward that is not theirs to give or receive - a beautiful goddess, youth, and the gold they've heard about from the Rhein. So the story begins in theft and deception, every god for himself.  Wotan wants power, Fricka wants Wotan, and they imagine that Valhalla will bind these things to them, or the gold will, or surely something will - but their doubt runs through the whole piece. Give it up, they say to each other, the gold or the girl, but that is the hardest thing to do.

Herrliche Wohnung, wonniger Hausrat, sollten dich binden zu säumender Rast.


Outside the theater, it is All Saints', and people are buying flowers and taking the trams to the cemeteries. There are the former citizens of Wien, Vienna, Vinobodna, in houses no more permanent than any built on earth or in the clouds. It's different in death, though, when the hands have opened and have had to let go. No one fights over the house. Flowers are brought, and poems, and balloons, and toys, and they say, this space belongs to us still.

Was mächtig der Furcht mein Mut mir erfand.


This morning, over coffee, I did some more work on my family tree, pages of my dead. I love the narrative of my immigrant ancestors. Piecing together the patchy stories left to us, I can build a sense of what these people gave to me - of course, that's not what they imagined they were doing. They did unreasonable things, crazy things, in the service of acquiring something bigger, grander, different. The terrible crossing, the backbreaking labor, the foreign language, the scarcity: when plenty began to arrive, it felt earned, deserved. Then the questions. What have you done, what do you imagine you have earned? Often they fought and broke off relations forever, over gold, over the goddess. 


Denn was nur lebt, will lieben.


My own dead are near me today. Grandma Alice, you've been gone almost a year. You helped me build my house. Little Halen, you gave us so much in such a brief time, you floored me with the devastating generosity you brought out in your family. I know where you are, under the tree in Northfield, next to Ralph at Ft. Snelling, in the beautiful Valhallas of my beloveds' hearts and minds. 


Alles, was ist, endet. 


Inside the theater, a beautiful woman rises out of the earth, her daughters call from the depths of the Rhein. Give us back what is ours. 


The treasure does not belong to you.

Open your eyes. Both of them.

dkz

L.

I ran from Alcina rehearsal to the small club in the eighteenth district. T. was only in town for one night. We had so many great nights when we were all together in New York, but our ties go back to college in Arizona. As T. blisters through his horn, I am in touch with both of those lives at once. New York always feels close, Arizona much less so. 


"Did you guys hear about L.?"T. likes to play Old Home Week with us, which is funny because he is kind of famous. We love it, the updates on gigs and breakups and kids.

We hadn't heard about L. "He's in jail."

Third floor Coke machine, L holding court as usual with a brace of other saxophone players. I cut through the cigarette haze with my 35 cents, looking for my mid-morning caffeine. They are laughing insiders, I'm embarrassed and shy surrounded by these older guys. L is drawing a robot-man in RayBans, holding a soprano saxophone, mouth open in horror: the senior recital poster of the silent long-haired person who is not yet MtMn. 


At home later, I begin a Google search that ends far too quickly; the name and the city instantly yield pages of gut-freezing print and video documentation. The internet spreads the small story over endless sites, a tornado blowing a house across an entire county: Former band teacher sentenced to fifteen years.

The music in my day is all Alcina, keeping our house covers in form. This is athletic music that one has to train regularly. The hours of fine-tuning pitch, coloratura, rhythm, and text are difficult and rewarding. A long line of music geek friendships extends behind this day of Handel. I remember rehearsing with L. A great musician, personally strange, like so many of the people I have known. Like me.  

I have not thought about him in so long. We both stayed in college for an age. We were never friends, but we saw each other nearly every day for eight years. We played music together on multiple occasions. He has a wife and children of his own. A tornado, a house blown apart.

Hey, I say to my sister, I think I know your student band teacher. She clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth, the universal junior high expression of dismissal. 
Mr. L? He's weird. I don't like band anyway. 


"You know the sabbatical semester when L. taught the studio?" T. drinks water these days, like me, graying hair around his strong dark face. "He made the most crazy-ass technical exercises for me, broken sixths all up and down the horn and shit like that. It was all because he couldn't stand my sound, but I tell you...he pushed me. I do all kinds of stuff on the horn because of him." T laughed, short and dry, and we all looked at each other.

Alcina is a sorceress that turns her lovers into beasts. A courageous wife rescues her enchanted husband from Alcina. There is the magic of a certain kind of love, and it is an illusion. The hero, Ruggiero, has a hard time understanding what is illusion and what is real. 


We walk home through the streets of Vienna and talk about how he always seemed like a big kid. Later, the stooped shoulders under the prison uniform, the small angry eyes. I search them far too long for evidence of someone I never knew. And yet his constant presence through our Arizona days brings them back more sharply in my mind than many more familiar triggers.

L. and I are buying Buster Bars at the DQ across the street from the music school. We try to eat them before they melt as we walk down Mill Avenue to his new studio. He and a friend are renting teaching space and doing instrument repair. I'm accompanying a small recital of his students, and he is also playing. MtMn and I will soon leave for Germany for my Fulbright year. I imagine that these days of study, of learning, of trying things out, will somehow never end. We finish our ice cream and rehearse his piece, a piece I heard MtMn play in my first week of college, a piece I accompanied T. on as he forced himself through his required classical recital. Tomorrow we will play it for L's students, for the kids who want to play as well as he does. 


I want to weep, for him, for his family, for his kids, and above all for the four other children. In fifteen years, they will be as old as we were when we played music, went to the DQ, drew recital posters, extended our childlike pursuits toward adulthood and wondered what would happen.

Ruggiero looks around the stage and sings,
Green meadows, pleasant groves, you will lose your beauty.
You will see loveliness changed to horror. 


dkz

Philip Levine, brand new Poet Laureate

(congratulations to the writer)

WHAT WORK IS

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it's someone else's brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who's not beside you or behind or
ahead because he's home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don't know what work is.

tempo

There is a small group of elementary schoolchildren practicing unison drumming in the playground across the street from this small apartment. MtMn practices Robert Johnson in the living room as I look back into the magic Web (did all my friends have fun at play?); my eyes, filled with a week´s worth of mountain and sea and sky, are dazzled again by pictures and stories that happened without their knowing. The seagulls cry in the setting sun, the salt air wafts in through the windows of our friend´s childhood bedroom.

It´s the usual time of rediscovery, loosed briefly from the sweet obligations of music-making, time-keeping, story-telling. What is rediscovered: music, time, story. Parts of life endure and others do not, strangers will take you in, words are everything and nothing in the same moment.

Sometime in the last weeks of hospitality, I got properly lost again. It was the food in our kitchen or the food in a family´s kitchen, or a friend´s, or a stranger´s. It was our bed or another´s. It was the familiar road or the unknown trail, the rain or the brilliant sun, the eloquence or the struggle for a single word. Non importa, Wurscht, whatever. Mountain, sea, sky.

The trick now is to come back home, magic mirror in hand, and stay lost.

dkz

northfield july 12

at some point, the suitcase,
the old car packed blind,
the headlong tumble out of the tree
before the updraft and the sky.

after this, all glory, all beauty,
boredom of days and the heart's unease,
the long ballad written in blood.

the nest remains on the branch,
the old house on the same street.
you think you know that place,
but you can not discover it
in ten thousand things.

dkz