Les Baricades Mistérieuses*

“Life is so exquisite a spell that everything conspires to break it.”
Emily Dickinson

You’re right to want to turn them off: sounds
of Couperin through an excruciating delicacy
of a plucked guitar – incessantly repetitive –
a music box of gilded eighteenth century bibelots –
that young man’s artful fragile body, fingers,
face, in place to breathe through wood and string
the sort of thing you’d never heard except
in some remote recess of dream, and yet
with such a human bloom of reassurance that
you know it just as surely as you’ve known
the dearest soft caress from mother, lover, brother –

oh, too many other floods and strains of feeling,
thought: all wrought within, upon this French
Baroque commodity of wordless song: what is it
harmonically but simple cadences, suspensions –
all some childish chordal riff? Bach would sniff.
But all you need’s a whiff: you’re back and longing
for it, jonesing for its smack, a hero hooked to heroin,
its slick addictive heralding of something so
precise and intimate and right that you must fight
to keep the thing from haunting you all night
and day and night and day – so anyway, you have

to turn the damned thing off. And so you do, and
what you hear are scratching noises from the claws
of an apartment dog next door, scraping at
a knob and lock – a dog who knows that barricades
are an intolerable injury and shock. What is this
thin pale veil between you and the rest of
everything? You only know to hail one source of
certitude that in its endless lending might befriend –
and bring at least a tiny measure of your vast
unknowing to an end. And so you watch and breathe
and eat and make love to the Couperin again.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjoRgi3e-Jc&feature=related

*Mysterious Barricades, Francois Couperin, 1710