Woman Singing
It is astonishing
to hear my words in her mouth;
but more astonishing still
to hear them sung to a melody not my own.
She invests the story with a different kind of passion;
death sounds more final,
love more eternal,
the tragedy more bitter:
this was how I heard it all in my head,
even to the resignation of the spurned lover
waiting for the kind word he will never hear
though he wait for decades.
The terror of the ballad is always understated,
detached, almost alien,
the words cool as mountain water,
tales told from a hard time,
of people living in a harsh land,
where life is short
and eternity but a drop in the ocean.
And so they died, the ballad says,
and an end to it.
Life goes on.
It is a strange thing for such stories to survive into this time;
but stranger still for a new narrative
to burst forth
as if these cool passions
had been slumbering,
hidden and unbidden,
awaiting an unguarded moment
to unburden their terrible tradition
of love, hate, and condemnation
into another era
when the depleted uranium shell
and the smart bomb
falling from six miles high
have institutionalised death
and cauterised its wounds
like flesh in a microwave.
I awoke singing a song without words
to the tune of two guitars I had dreamed of,
playing in the window of an antique shop,
while, from the back,
the sound of flamenco stamping out a counter-rhythm .
I knew it was a tragic ballad,
and I even knew the name of its main character,
and its subject:
love, hatred, jealousy,
and death.
I wrote the words down,
there, sitting on the bed in my pyjamas,
quickly, lest they go,
but by the last line
the guitar-tune had gone out of my head
into the lost memory where all my best songs lie hidden.
I made a new tune,
sang it, was dissatisfied by the facility of its pastiche,
moved on,
and resolved to give it to anyone out there
who might have overheard my lost melody.
I like your song,
she said,
and I have a tune for it;
if you don't mind
tonight I'd like to sing it.
Far from minding, I said,
on the contrary: the bloody thing's driving me crazy
and perhaps you can put me out of my misery.
And so tonight she sings it,
with exactly the right combination of passion and detachment.
There, hear that edge in her voice,
right there:
my blood runs cold just to hear it.
She has added a second strain
which pairs the quatrains
and counterposes them one to the other
in a way implicit in the way the verses flow,
yet unnoticed in my original four-line stanzas.
These characters dredged up
from who knows where
in my subconscious
come alive in her mouth
and I can see them
like people in Dales towns I have driven through
without meeting,
like characters from these wind-wuthered grey stone houses:
hard, bitter, consumed by passions that destroy them,
even as they keep them alive.
They live now,
no longer children of my fancy,
but real,
real as flesh and blood.
My blood,
her flesh,
my words,
her melody:
our song.
December 9-12, 1999
Edited January 30, 2002
