When Angles Burp Jazz

By Peter Laugesen

   Pound in a cage in Pisa. Hindemith´s
proud music from 1939
whipped up by a Glenn Gould with foam around his fingers
the trumpet dances so heftily.
Pound is 54 or 55
- my age -
and Pisa is five or six years into a future
nobody can know.
   It´s his firm belief that art
is an argument. In short he´s mad.
He walks into the darkness
behind a roadside inn: "Why don´t you
just leave me here? I´m nothing but trouble.
What little mother will hum my cantos
to her child in its cradle? Me, a fascist.
Here is the open road. I´m coming now, Cino.
There´s a place waiting for me in Dante´s hell.
My paradise was nothing but fragments. Everything´s a fragment,
all of it.
The lines ramble around my cage without rest. I see them,
hear them talk, all of them. Just come. I listen. I see."

Translated by Anne Born