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"Paper Anniversary"
The concert-hall was crowded the night of the Crash
but the wives were away; many mothers gone sick to their beds
or waiting at home for late extras and latest telephone calls
had sent their sons and daughters to hear music instead.
I came late with my father; and as the car flowed stop
I heard Mozart developing through the door
where the latecomers listened; water-leap, season of coolness,
talisman of relief; but they worried, they did not hear.
Into the hall of formal rows and the straight-sitting seats
(they took out pencils, they muttered at the program's margins)
began the double concerto, Brahms season of fruit
but they could not meet it with love; they were lost with their fortunes.
In that hall was no love where love was often felt
reaching for music, or for the listener beside:
orchids and violins—precision dances of pencils
rode down the paper as the music rode.
Intermission with its spill of lights found heavy
breathing and failure pushing up the aisles,
or the daughters of failure greeting each other under
the eyes of an old man who has gone mad and fails.
And this to end the cars, the trips abroad, the summer
countries of palmtrees, toy moneys, curt affairs,
ending all music for the evening dress audience.
Fainting in telephone booth, the broker swears.
"I was cleaned out at Forty—" "No golf tomorrow" "Father!"
but fathers there were none, only a rout of men
stampeded in a flaming circle; and they return
from the telephones and run down the velvet lane
as the lights go down and the Stravinsky explodes
spasms of rockets to levels near delight,
and the lawyer thinks of his ostrich-feather wife
lying alone, and knows it's getting late.
He journeys up the aisle, and as the Debussy begins,
drowning out the concert hall, many swim up and out,
distortions of water carry their bodies through
the deformed image of a crippled heart.
The age of the sleepless and the sealed arrives.
The music spent. Hard-breathing, they descend,
wait at the door or at the telephone.
While from the river streams a flaw of wind,
washing our sight; while all the fathers lie
heavy upon their graves, the line of cars progresses
toward the blue park, and the lobby darkens, and we
go home again to the insane governess.
The night is joy, and the music was joy alive,
alive is joy, but it will never be
upon this scene upon these fathers these cars
for the windows already hold photography
of the drowned faces the fat the unemployed—
pressed faces lie upon the million glass
and the sons and daughters turn their startled faces
and see that startled face.
—Muriel Rukeyser
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