Poof

I love listening to Rachel Podger. I love having the pure sounds of a violin going on in my head, the brightness of Bach making my brain glow with sublime sillinesses, solecisms and nurturing ounces of turquoise embedded in lovelorn sound, wistful melodies palpable as rope, the hemp of reverie, glistening radiances of sound in sanctioned sawhorse territory. By that I mean wood. The smell of it. The look of it. The grain of it. The shine of it lacquered in a Venetian studio.  Cows grazing on the slopes of the Dolomites. And then there’s Lucinda Williams singing “Magnolia,” a song by J.J. Cale. My God it’s beautiful. It sounds and feels as authentic as old wood. Sunset breeze over the buffalo hills of eastern Montana. Melancholy as the whippoorwill. I get completely lost in this song. It puts Putin and his army in the Ukraine out of my mind long enough to get a bearing on what’s real and what’s left for the senses in this senseless world. O world please don’t blow up today. I keep seeing that flash. Then poof! I’m gone. Without knowing I’m gone. Everything gone. You gone. Me gone. We gone. That’s how I imagine it. The big one. The big explosion. Planet Earth blasted into rockdom. Icy and forbidding as Pluto. And why? Is it worth it trying to find cause and effect around here? Very little in human experience has been logical. Though given a chance, I can rationalize almost anything. Almost. The rest is silence. Hamlet carried offstage. Ophelia drowning in her fairytale gown. Rimbaud in a caravan crossing the Ethiopian desert. It always comes down to that. Barrenness. Bags of ivory & coffee. The riches of the world exchanged in crowded souks. Voices of old women. Sleep of old men. Kids gazing into wells. The world spun in protozoan glee. Ended with a grimace. And a blink.