Liberation of Dissonance

          Homage to Arnold Schoenberg

It's what he called his work, his liberation,
as if each note he heard might break the threads
of gravity, might burn a bit and darken
as he took his nightly walk, in his head

some hymn without a fulcrum, a native key.
And how Promethean it sounded then,
it sounds still, to take the giant tree
that is a tonal root and its extensions

and rip the thirsty tendrils from the planet.
But it wasn't so. Or if you called it
freedom, it was a vast and blackened net
drifting, without center, perhaps, but not

without regime, as if one government
rose through the congress of another.
So bound to dissonance, so beauty-bent,
the tones spoke among themselves like numbers.

Sweet, yes. Unnerving, at first, especially;
though they undid themselves in the heat
of his insomnia, those nights his country
woke in smoke and sirens, a thing apart.

Or later as he stood on the sharp prow
dividing the exiled waters of his stare,
the red stamp of the passport (for now
at least) drowned in a still Atlantic of stars.

Bruce Bond
Western Humanities Review
Volume LIX, Number 2
Fall 2005

Copyright © Western Humanities Review 2005,
University of Utah
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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