Homer the Great.
The Victor Dog
Bix to Buxtehude to Boulez.
The little white dog on the Victor
label
Listens long and hard as he is able.
It’s all in a day’s work, whatever
plays.
From judgment, it would seem, he has
refrained.
He even listens earnestly to Bloch,
Then builds a church upon our acid
rock.
He’s man’s—no—he’s the Leiermann’s
best friend,
Or would be if hearing and listening
were the same.
Does he hear? I fancy he rather
smells
Those lemon-gold arpeggios in Ravel’s
“Les jets d’eau du palais de ceux qui
s’aiment.”
He ponders the Schumann Concerto’s
tall willow hit
By lightning, and stays put. When he
surmises
Through one of Bach’s eternal boxwood
mazes
The oboe pungent as a bitch in heat,
Or when the calypso decants its raw
bay rum
Or the moon in Wozzeck reddens ripe for murder,
He doesn’t sneeze or howl; just
listens harder.
Adamant needles bear down on him from
Whirling of outer space, too black,
too near—
But he was taught as a puppy not to
flinch,
Much less to imitate his bête noire
Blanche
Who barked, fat foolish creature, at
King Lear.
Still others fought in the road’s
filth over Jezebel,
Slavered on hearths of horned and
pelted barons.
His forebears lacked, to say the
least, forbearance.
Can nature change in him? Nothing’s
impossible.
The last chord fades. The night is
cold and fine.
His master’s voice rasps through the
grooves’ bare groves.
Obediently, in silence like the
grave’s
He sleeps there on the still-warm
gramophone
Only to dream he is at the première
of a Handel
Opera long thought lost—Il Cane Minore.
Its allegorical subject is his story!
A little dog revolving round a
spindle
Gives rise to harmonies beyond
belief,
A cast of stars . . . Is there in
Victor’s heart
No honey for the vanquished? Art is
art.
The life it asks of us is a dog’s
life.
James Merrill
OC
Kin 170: White Magnetic Dog
I unify in order to love
Attracting loyalty
I seal the process of heart
With the magnetic tone of purpose
I am guided by my own power doubled.
Everyone projects onto reality according to their own karmic disposition.*
*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2014-2015.
Sahasrara Chakra
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