Memorial Chapel
We’ve arrived expressly to be transported
while we sit stock-still in the college chapel’s
1800 Federal architecture,
witnessing music,
Schubert, Bach, Prokofiev, Shostakovich,
week in, week out, making this room a spare, sparse
paradise, a garden where sound waves loiter
rounded to crystal.
Now, for instance, Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge in
B-flat major scrolls from the quartet’s guts while
listening I study again the names carved
back of the players,
marble-clad memorial to the Great War
dead, the undergrads and alumni who got
butchered giving
didn’t desire and
lie transported off overseas. The Grosse
Fuge spreads thick, deciduous layers, aural
flavors—ash, ambrosia—in living ears un-
stopped with the earth, un-
like the ears of Wesley D. Karker, Luther
Hagar, William W. Waiteskill, Herbert
Rankin, Talbot Carmichael, Allen Ashton,
Kennedy Conklin,
Wolcott Caulkins, Alwyn G. Levy, Howard Thorne, and
dozens more stone deaf to the music, deafer
than a post, than Beethoven, college guys now
deafer than when they
sat in boring lectures and dreamt that bloody
high romance, imagined those French jeunes filles, but
found nothing transporting them, no returning
even as cargo.
Reprinted
from The Long Fault. Copyright © 2008 by Jay Rogoff.