The Bandonium Players (from The Songs Of The Erinnyes, Sonnets, Odes, and Elegies by Jay Noya, Brigantium Press)

1

Pink upon lilac and pink upon violet mother-of-pearl flowers
Inlaid throughout the instrument’s edges and corners
Erupting from the ends of stems
From twisting and curling vines
Starting nowhere and ending nowhere
Once a German instrument in most respects
If not entirely proper it was just the same familiar
And modest and jolly and accessible
It was familiar in the beer halls of Hamburg and Berlin
And it was a matter of time only
Before the Germans and their instrument
Traveled to South America where the music altered
Most conspicuously and where the Germanic sentiment
And intent and directions of style and rhythms
Slipped away as it had slipped away
From the beer halls back home and crossed the Atlantic
And in Argentina what was left evolved into the tango
It evolved into Mephistopheles’ own music
The Argentines went mad with the nostalgic lyrics
And the wailings and mutterings of Carlos Gardel
The guitars and the bandoniums and the cigarettes
And the cheap booze and the whores and the gangsters
Turned the atmosphere into delirium and desperation
The tango dancers and singers and musicians
Turned their gatherings into a refuge and limbo for the forsaken
For the nihilists and the addicted to hallucinations
And the liars and the cheaters and assassins for hire
With stiletto blades and revolvers in their coat pockets
And the addicted to chasing ghosts and ghouls and love
The mystery was the music worrying the heart and worrying the soul
It was the swirling and rubbing bodies moving in the dimness of backrooms
The tango came and went and was played in basements and salons
In theatres and bedrooms and bordellos of the Buenos Aires slums
Where an esprit de corps prevailed among whores and pimps
And drunks and customers with fats wallets and priests and gangsters
The bandonium as much as the singing and the guitars was the tango
The instruments did not differ from the women and the men
Who listened to it or played it or danced to it
And saw themselves in what they heard
The guitar notes slashed the silence to shreds
And the bandonium and the mandolin followed
And as in a phantasmagoria bodies shuffled across the dancing floor
There had to be and there was a flower in the tango garden
And the bandonium was the flower with the poisonous nectar

2

Marguerite and Raymond are Acadians living in Louisiana
Who play and sing and dance to Acadian music
They’ve been married for nineteen years and have two girls
The girls play guitars and fiddle and mandolin
And sing and dance to Acadian music
When they’re not playing and singing rock ‘nd roll
Or when they’re not playing and singing the blues
In a small room with two windows and two mirrors
And two small beds and one old table and two chairs
And shelves built up from the floor to the ceiling
And covering every inch of free wall space
Rose and Adele are twins but not identical
Their guitar playing and singing are similarly different
And Marguerite and Raymond can sometimes guess why
And other times they’re just glad to listen to the girls play
And listen to them sing and watch them dance
The girls’ room is up on the second storey of an old house
That went up no one knows when exactly
An old house with a veranda which has needed mending
But got none decades and decades
Before the Acadian family of musicians arrived
And took over the old house next to the Nartius
From an eighty-two year old woman named Laurel-Anne Evans
Who died one April day just minutes before noon
As the first daffodils showed their yellow flowers
Here was this old house less than one hundred yards away
From banks of the Nartius a place noisy and stirring with life
And color and fragrances and mysterious prospects
For the curious eye and the curious pair of eyes and feet
Moving across it and about it moving and investigating
Its narrowness and its solitude and its shadows
A place where the twilight stalked the stranger
And beguiled him with its whisperings and secrets
And beguiled him with its music of rills and reeds
Swaying in unseen and silent winds fetching up at the banks
A place where memories hampered one’s thinking
A place where memories hindered one’s sight and hearing
What one saw and heard and imagined and felt
Couldn’t be reconciled with one had seen or heard in the daytime
The Mississippi was splitting itself up
With every single tick of an unseen and unheard clock
Water moved in the dark and during the daytime
Water invaded and approached and otherwise accosted
And besieged and overwhelmed and erased and erected
New topographies seldom visited or noticed
New topographies that vanish one day when others replace them
It’s a place where meaning and consequence
Are the source of prayer and count only as payment or credit
For a lonely and forlorn person’s place
In another unknowable universe of light with its glorious boundaries
And topography of goodness and life everlasting
The Nartius is one of the thousand or more Mississippi tributaries
And puddles and creeks and nameless canals
It’s a place where the Mississippi knows it all
And claims it all and threatens it all
And where all types of history are but whimpers and rumors
It’s a world of water and wisteria and madness and darkness
Nevertheless there are days when the sun is foremost and primeval
When the sun is universal and tyrannical and permeates every corner
And insinuates itself into every thought and erects walls
And crowds queer and unfamiliar places with voices and faces
The lot of whom are strangers chattering away peculiarly
The Mississippi can usurp and alter and deprive of sense
And deprive of meaning and deprive of comfort and obligations
And turn one man’s and one’s woman’s life
Into an apotheosis and into a horror of absurd proportions
Into a nightmare of apocalyptic moments and wonder
As it drives its great and small bodies of water
Further inland and further east and west and down ravines
And lowlands and through forests and woods
And across meadows and over ridges and outcrops
And turns and bends twists out of sight and away in the distance
But the goal is the sea where it’ll release itself
And deposit its mysteries and histories
Along with the lives and deaths of everything mortal

3

After dinner Marguerite and Raymond and the girls
Two bandoniums and two guitars and voices
With plenty of finger thumping and feet stumping
Played and sung and danced up and down the veranda
Within hearing of the river Nartius
And under the intrusive density and well-like shadows
Of poplar and oaks and gum and willow trees
Their songs were about the Mississippi
They were songs about the living and dying of everything mortal
And when they were done singing secular songs
They turn to the Bible and they sang about immortality
They sang about living in sin and living in grace
They sang about ruin and perdition and great abominations
They sang about prayer and the capacity for forgiveness
They sang about the mystery of redemption
They sang about renunciation and terrible trespassing
They sang about repentance and humiliation and about striving
To reach the one place where the spirit welcomes the soul
And death isn’t a threat and isn’t a blemish
Upon the fate of all human thought and human endeavors

4

Marguerite and Raymond played bandoniums
And Rose and Adele played guitars and sang and danced
With plenty of finger thumping and feet stumping
They played and sang and danced up and down the veranda


© J. Noya, 2006

The World Ends And The Maggots Sing (from The Songs Of The Erinnyes, Sonnets, Odes, and Elegies by Jay Noya, Brigantium Press)

(or Lunar Dirge In April)


1

Jonas Peregrine can’t smoke and can’t drink scotch or wine
And cannot leave his bed
To see and do what others see and do in the streets
What he does see is a restrictive wedge of the sky
(when he shuts his eyes it’s memories
of a thousand skies unrolled like an endless Persian carpet
and not what his window offers)
From his sickroom’s bed
It is his death bed although everybody shrinks from the notion
It’s in their eyes and whimpers and sighs
It’s in the way Jonas Peregrine is regarded
Their solemnity is his death sentence
They play their part and he play his
(he isn’t willing to play the role gracefully but he follows the rules
and only seldom does he mumble obscenities and worse that go unheard)
He knows the bed shall be his last
Because he won’t be moved again
The hospitals won’t have anything more to do with him
It is over he’s been told by his physician
He understands what he’s been told
Jonas Peregrine is lost he has slipped
Towards accepting the inevitable as his own
The status quo of the doomed
(never mind that everyone weeps and promises
not to forget and neglect the memories)
He belongs among the already disregarded
From the ranks of the living and the telephonically available
There aren’t any more words there aren’t any type of words
To make anything worth making out of the situation
When the flesh gives up it’s over
And words have ceased to be words
Words have ceased to have that quicksilver with import
With an assigned role and meaning and color
Origin and destination have been snapped from them
It is then that words return to where they started from
Not easily located in the lungs and the throat
To end up inside the mouth until the sound whistles out
And the noise is made and spent
And an ear several ears catch it and arrange it
So much has gone into it that it can’t be removed again
That’s what its meaning is and how it has acquired it
The ringing of those words is worth cherishing and replaying
The words of the mouth and the heart
The words of the eye and the ear and the face
The words of the streets and rooms and theatres
The words of parks and boardwalks and beaches
The words of hotel rooms and beds and bars and cinemas
The words from books and photographs and memories
The words that can only belong to the living heart
He heard it inside his head and he repeated it
Words are images and sound
A fragment from a stupid old German song comes into his head
The verses roll off his tongue and out of his mouth with gusto
An anonymous song familiar to whores and drunks mostly
Wer Lieb nicht Wein Weib und Gesang
Der bleitbt ein Narr sein Leben Lang
A Hamburg woman named Maria taught him the song
Thirty years back and reckoned now as a wink of the eye
Three decades of everything squared away
By a single flicker of the eyelid
And saliva collects on the tongue and a noise comes into the mouth
The throat the lungs the head the mouth the ear the eye
And the world and I in it beyond and all of it it’s in the song
It was the same woman who warned him
That only whores and drunks were fond of it
Wer Lieb nicht Wein Weib und Gesang
Der bleitbt ein Narr sein Leben Lang


2

Jonas Peregrine laughs at his own words
Jonas Peregrine laughs at his own thoughts
And wishes oh how he wishes it
That he could leave his bed and contact
All libraries and bookshops and anyone who’s ever owned
Any of his books and demand that the lot of them
Be turned over forthwith just on his say so
Without explanations or compensation
Just on his say so and he laughs at the absurdity of it
He laughs at the irony of his imminent death
And whatever else follows death
He laughs at his own absence from among the living
The predicament he finds himself in is ludicrous
(ludicrous being a word that happens to appeal to him
because it rolls so badly off the tongue
And manages to embarrass both the speaker and the listener)
He sees himself leaving and bowing as he does
The rhyme inside his head goes off
There’s a timetable to keep
Turn to the left and turn to the right
There’s a timetable to keep
Turn turn turn turn keep up keep up
It’s the wait which causes the discomfiture
The waiting that is responsible for the word ludicrous cropping up
The absurdity is total and oppressive
It can not be final because
Ignorance and apprehension do not lend the wait any gravity
The sky opens up and lets the wind and the rain through
To soak everything below it
And to make believers out of the incredulous and the fastidious
The absurdity is the enigma
It’s the same as calling out in a dream
A shout in the dark and the ensuing silence
And in the dark a face appears and it swivels about
There’s no doubts as to its being a face
But there’s to be no voice to match the face
Terror is the message that the face coveys
And the terror spreads over the body
Freezing the spine and collar bone and cutting off all respiration
And depriving the limbs of the possibility of movement
And what light there is pivots
And yields a chasm of darkness
A long sleep of nothing but the cold earth and rocks
And the dead night with its dead stars of a desert
That has been a desert since the beginning of time
A desert transformed into songs and voices by wayward winds
And the pairs of hands that write and erase
And rewrite poems no one shall read or hear
Verses of poetry that aren’t poems
But to the poet who sings them
In this desert and in this place and in this fissure
And inside this rock and inside this acorn
And hidden out of sight in the hollow of the oak and the pine
Wrapped as muscle and feather about the gull’s wings
Smoothed and cooled and split into infinitesimal components
To form rows and barrels of waves
Sent to crash and reshape the littoral of landmasses
Unseen and unvisited but by singing poets and dancers
And men with long beards and women with large breasts
There are such poems and nights and days
And women and men and ghosts who sing
And dance at the sound of the words in poems
Poems heard and written nowhere else but in this desert
A desert where thorny plants
And invisible lives alone flourish
A desert where ghosts and salamanders
Share the hollows of bones and skulls
And share the transparency and dull luminosity of the rain
But these are only rumors and promises of things to come
Promises that are rather more like rumors than promises
And the type of rumors poets are known to share
With executioners and priests at the confessional
These are rumors shared with uncommunicative old pensioners
And old seamen without too many years left in them
Old seamen watching the sea on cold wet mornings
Poets are then willing to recite Homer in the original Greek
On such mornings and to such old men poets will sing Homer
(in the absence of life there is nothing to be named
and nothing to grapple with and nothing to replace
and nothing to remember)
The world has turned into an expanse of ice devoid of skies
Enumerate everything the philosopher tells himself
Catalogue it but catalogue for whom
Catalogue it out of spite
Catalogue because not to catalogue it
Would be to deny yourself and what passes for you life
A life that is the stories you’ve told yourself
The stories you’ve made up to erase that other person
Who was born in your place and shared your name
And a goodly portion of your life
Until you discover a way of making up a world
Entirely your own a world entirely to your dimensions
Filled with your own architecture
Peopled and alive with your machines and words
Clocks and landscape and seas and birds and skies
Alive with nights and days of your own shaping
One long dream until the day everything stops
When there is to be no more dreaming
And words won’t matter
Enumerate what you wish the philosopher tells himself
Enumerate what shall never be
Describe the warm undulating green expanses of land and trees
And rivers and mountains and seas
Where there aren’t pirouetting birds and insects drumming
And reptilian magicians doing vanishing tricks
And no dancing butterflies
Embroidering sheets of gossamer with air and light
And no spiders writing messages in mysterious languages
It’s your peculiar conceit to have made up all of it



3

The wait allows nothing and no one to earn any rights to gravity
A dying man cannot scoff at death
Even if he was once a famous philosopher
And the author of difficult books on difficult subjects
Books none but a handful of lunatics and musicians
And chess players read in rainy evenings
When the all the wine is gone and the television
Isn’t showing reruns of The Last Days of Pompeii
Jonas Peregrine can’t smoke and can’t drink scotch or wine
And cannot leave his bed
To see and do what others see and do in the streets
What he does see is a restrictive wedge of the sky
(when he shuts his eyes it’s memories
of a thousand skies unrolled like an endless Persian carpet
and not what his window offers)
The philosophers dies an ordinary death
He hasn’t grown wings and water drowns him
And fire burns him and the lack of air suffocates him
The philosopher dies an ordinary death because he is ordinary
But unlike ordinary mortals he anticipates a horrible end
An end which includes a just and all-knowing and merciful God
And that is too much for his ordinary head
Stuffed with ordinary little ideas about independence
And the biological simplicity of the universe
In the philosopher’s world there is no God
All the theories he’s concocted prove that God can not exist
He doesn’t lament God’s absence
He rejoices in his ordinary simplicity and algebraic tables
The philosopher rejoices in his mortality and the smallness of his heart
He rejoices in his life wasted in quarrels and hatreds
That failed to convince others as he’s failed to convince himself
That man is small because he thinks and lives small
That man is insignificant and hopeless even when thinks he isn’t
The ordinary man lives a life of dread and constant fear
The philosopher has discovered this life for him
He’s studied it and theorized and authored books about it
Nothing in nature is as useless as an ordinary man’s heart
It is Jonas Peregrine who’s made up this conceit
Jonas Peregrine calls it his one grand scheme and discovery
The philosopher can’t smoke and can’t drink scotch or wine
And cannot leave his bed
To see and do what others see and do in the streets
What he does see is a restrictive wedge of the sky
He hasn’t grown wings and water drowns him
And fire burns him and the lack of air suffocates him
The philosopher dies an ordinary death because he is ordinary
Everything worth having is gone
Everything worth knowing is left to the maggots
To dispose of and erase
The maggots will surely silence what remains (what can remain?)
Of the voice inside the fleshless head and lips
The maggots in the skull licking and cleaning the bones
Memories are forfeited by these unobserved creatures of the soil
The world ends and the maggots sing


© J.Noya 2006

I Who Blessed Thee For Thy Maidenly Shape (from The Songs Of The Erinnyes, Sonnets, Odes, and Elegies by Jay Noya, Brigantium Press)

I who blessed thee for thy maidenly shape
And who took thee in thy magenta bloom
And then lost this very treasure in a wink
Oh how I’ve cursed myself and swore since nightly
For the reckless and unmitigated spendthrift I was
Now forlorn and oblivious and frozen I stare into space
Taking only passing comfort
In a trusty companion’s words
That life is roomy yet and the odds unbounded



© J. Noya, 2006

Sonnets 2 and 3 (from The Songs Of The Erinnyes, Sonnets, Odes, and Elegies by Jay Noya, Brigantium Press)

Sonnet 2


It’s a peculiar invention that alters what passes beyond it
That turns all it catches into an obligation and a puzzle
It’s to be a message framed by a plain rectangular space
The window is a space and an enigma and a word
A window it’s a book replete with words and sounds and pictures
I’m to be the watchman and the guard and the judge
Standing at the slit in the wall counting and humming
And waiting the night through and quivering with it
And later it’s to be the sun’s turn to scorch it all
With a remoteness and disdain that only a god can dream up
And issue as law and remonstrance to all
That belongs in a garden of flowers and water of days and nights
It’s to be through the watchman’s eyes that I peer at the world
One day the watchman’s eyes must bring me the end
As well as the concluding extravagance of the light I’ve watched



Sonnet 3

And waited on hour by hour and counted its layers and petals
There’ll be someone else standing at the slit in the wall
Counting and humming and judging the air and its darkness
There’ll be a watchman hiding in the dark watching and waiting
On the sea and listening to its mutterings and warnings and threats
There’ll be a watchman worrying about a breach in the wall
It’s the sea that’ll cause the walls to crumble and the light to go
The light goes as the light goes it goes because it must
It’s the absence of eyes that surprises the dark
And the dreaming god and his garden creatures and trees
And hedges and flowers and singing water
It’s the absence of eyes and ears that buries the world in sleep
And causes it to fail and to destroy the watchman’s world
It’s next to nothing now it’s mostly delirium and whisperings


© J. Noya, 2006

The Railway Station Fire (from The Songs Of The Erinnyes, Sonnets, Odes, and Elegies by Jay Noya, Brigantium Press)

Before it reverberated as fire
It reached me as a faint gasp
A gasp that didn’t immediately concern me
But for its noxious cloying sweetness
Even then I closed my eyes to fix it in my head
To learn its origin treating it as unfamiliar
But hopeful in my optimism
Hopeful in utter lack of years and cumulative experience
Of busy eyes and ears as I listened even then
And closed my eyes to fix it
Here it was as a gasp first
Later as a spark of silver
Later even later still it reached me
As Henry shouted from the bottom of the slope
But unwilling and unable to show myself
I kept low with my face against the moist earth
Dark brown and traveled by ants
Trails and trails of ants religiously flung abroad
In unison communal fright
And the practical single idea to guide them out of misery
A misery which I then couldn’t have resolved
Into an abhorrence of the future
Soon the others joined Henry at the bottom of the slope
For the shouting and the clamoring
Come and see the fire at the station they chanted
Come and catch the fire
It’ll be over in five minutes
It’s burning
I could hear them and said in a whisper
Liars liars liars liars liars leave me alone
Liars leave me alone liars
And I kept still in my wet and dark ignominy
A dark ignorance and very comfortable too
Come out and come out they shouted
Clamored in languorous cadenzas
It had been dark but now light steadily softened
The creeping evening’s rim
The consolation left me
That such couldn’t be summer shadows
Hardly the shadow dispensed to secret away forever
Nightly doings spoiled by a foreign light-source
Along along it went along the way
Not in reverie and not in august anything
Along as a cicada’s whir
The afternoon’s sigh and then evening and dusk
And later the rest and all to succumb without appeal
Without the relaxing of laws
Not a whim these folds of night unrolled
No natural prank sinking in the corner of my eye
The procession and the dark gowns
The procession I repeated
And the bombazine
They’re saying that I’ll die alone in this place
Across the way from the railway station
At the feet of the eucalyptuses
How am I to blame for what they see
And what they shall never see?
And what am I to tell them if I see what I see?
Night and day pendulum-like in oscillation trapped
The night
And the day
And the night
And the day pendulum-like
No no this is not what the dead time is like
No no of it’s to be a twill weave
It’s because it is best suited briefly or not
It’s best suited if the eye catches against it
And inevitably the reasons follow
Back and forth lap against lap fold upon fold
Fetching up and hissing lingeringly
Fire fire fire fire fire fire fire


© J. Noya, 2006