The dearly beloved
gathered in a Steinway graveyard.
Fidgeting in pianoforte pews carved from
Bösendorfer barebones.
A circle of celebrants in a clavichord chamber,
this chapel of Chappells.
Here in this timbered temple
an angel angular arises –
this faerie-bride dazzle dancing slowly to
her dulcet-toned dulcimer.
A seraphim searching for her lost love-eternal,
twisting and turning in the longing;
a gauze-white butterfly lost in the loop,
then scattered to the four winds like confetti. . .
There is to be no wedding,
Photo: Diana Revell
yet the priest remains;
this curate of curiosities, bespectacled in Bible Black,
the Owl with Two faces from the order of St. Burnt Paw.
A caped croonsader dispensing dreams and benedictions with
guitar chimes that ring the changes of a bell-less belfry.
Fleet-foxed folk in mode medieval,
swells of sound from the Vox vortex that set him aglow in
a halo of High-Church psychedelic psaltery and imagined hurdy-gurdy.
Old wood incense, long dormant, revives in the
reverential reverb and gentle drone.
Blessed and beatific he leaves us, slipping in silence to the
vestry at the end of his melted Kit-Kat universe.
And so, the Moth manifests.
Woken from slumber in the lungs of the organ loft,
she descends in a flutter of fishnet-torn fringes.
Settled at the Steinway, wrestling the eighty-eight,
forcing its submission with a rush of arpeggios
chords, discord, and the unexpected. . .
resolution.
But, above all of this, her voice.
That voice. . .
Photo: Diana Revell
A siren-call swansong, lacrima-laced;
the mesmera of moth spiralling candle in vain,
forever fascinated by the flame.
Songs swoop and soar, ebb and flow,
drifting from the shore into the operatic heights of a sea symphonic,
a cathedral of sound carried on her outsized lectern-eagle wings.
Every tumult, every wave-tower tamed together with her pilot-partner yet,
like lute strings, finding spaces in their togetherness.
Sound-sails set safely by her bosun’s steady hands,
the Moth, plucky and prow-perched,
soothes the Storm Cat of the High C’s.
Every roar, every wail rattles the bones of
the saints incrypted below us till,
at last, the Ravel unravels and we are becalmed;
deep in the Siphonophores and seductive stillness of
smooth-as-glass soprano.
Tenebris turns to lux in a stained-window sunrise
and a crowning coda:
a swell of looping stridency that
shortens the way and beaches us,
gasping, but safe, amongst the Dunes.
Wings singed with dark beauty in the final note’s decay,
the Moth can fly no more.
Prostrate in prayer on the white altar of St. Roland,
she accepts our adulation;
before the candle, snuffed out by a burnt paw,
bids us farewell in smoky semaphore.
Elated, we stumble onto parched pavements in
the bus-burgundy nighttime;
the many, but made one, in the absolute joy of sorrow.
Photo: Diana Revell
Header photo: Diana Revell
