Tchaikovsky at the Trinity Site: A Dance of Sorts in Three Acts

What could be worse I’d asked & meant it, steeling myself

for those endless nights, seersucker suit crammed with peppermints

filched from our perennial Chez Moi meal, knowing whole-hog

what I was in for: barely in-synch candy-cane twirls, snowflakes

tottering as they pirouette & everything meant to dazzle

merely something to endure. Even the latex-rope-rigged pine,

cued by the glockenspiel’s midnight chimes, which spread, loomed,

grew with the quivering ascent of strings until it almost touched

the mock-clouds cruising the theater’s star-dappled dark

& the prop walls of the house fell slowly away, breaking apart

as we knew they would, disassembling into nightmare

for the girl on stage. I couldn’t have cared less, & each year

Pure gravy, of course, to seize even a glimpse of those bodies

untangling, to witness that silence, pause, the eternity

of the movable pit’s descent to the labyrinth of rooms below

as the light-struck dancers wandered adrift in what looked like horror,

shame, the thought they couldn’t go on. When a voice proclaimed

the Mouse King is unhurt, we knew it was a lie but no matter:

before long we were plunged into the Kingdom of Sweets

as if the war had never happened, as if we’d always been

in a world of florescent teeming & tin-foiled thrones

with the Sugar Plum Fairy tiptoeing in chiffon to music

Tchaikovsky knew was confectionary froth yet couldn’t stopper

his delight. That had churned in his mind while lost in New York,

weeping on Broadway, grieving for his sister’s death. That,

while dining on turtle-gravy oysters in a Pullman car en route

to Niagara’s unending roar, he doodled on & off. For nothing.

For a commission. Because he was told to do so & paid well.

Because he’d solved the riddle of the sugar plum dance,

long before it was used to pawn detergent & Fords,

by discovering in Paris the celesta, a hammered instrument

he called divine, with as-of-yet untold effects. Not far from here,

in the Journado del Muerto, the world’s first countdown began.

Even if today we know what happens in that predawn

darkness, the men gathered there guessed. And wagered,

some said, that the air might ignite & destroy—how else

to say this?—everything. Who knew seconds could be

so long, one wrote, & must have felt time altogether stop

as he turned from the site miles away, covered his head, & heard,

as a radio station crossed bands with the army’s broadcast,

that voice flirt with static before it disappeared into

the gauze of violins which opens The Nutcracker Suite.

It didn’t last long, but there it was, tumbling across

the greasewood, yucca & stones to the men crouching

with sunscreen & welder’s glass to see what had never been.

Is there much to say about this fluke, the random convergence

of faiths & worlds, other than it means as little as

the thunderous noise some of them heard near the salt grass

a few hours before The Gadget went off: frogs mating

in the monsoon puddles. They watched them glisten for a while

& cots, nickel-ante poker & rye, to wait for hours for the clock

to begin & at least until the next dawn came didn’t listen

to the night again. Who hasn’t wanted melody to mean more?

To make at least something happen as it flares across

the arid earth, then disappears? As it ricochets through

the hockey ring’s rafters during The Nutcracker on Ice

or in the basement of a Milwaukee church before the ballet’s lead

half-stumbles, half-glides, half-imitates Munch’s Scream

by clasping her palms to her cheeks. Are we meant to care

this girl weeps for a broken toy & couldn’t dance to save her life?

To watch her gangly legs for grace we know won’t come? Still,

afterwards, over heaps of ham salad at the postdance buffet,

I lie & tell her she was beautiful & she is. As is the bomb

when it comes at last, igniting that rising fire which seems

to never stop, a luminous boiling which bores its way into

all who watch, a charring flash of scarlet & green which pounces

across miles ahead of the roar, blazing every peak with light.

As is the desert afterwards when they find it seared

a translucent jade. And clusters of emerald beads in its crater

which, one wrote, we danced across, raising bourbon

to the sun now truly beginning to rise, wailing like wolves

& weaving in a snakeline because it worked. Of all things,

there’s a jazz ballad I think of whenever I stumble across

the words of those who stood in the desert, watching the light

of what they’d made. The flame of it

may dwindle to an ember

& the stars forget to shine. Or do I think of those men each time

I hear Midnight Sun? No matter, since nothing denotes

only itself but instead gives off a far-flung glare, making

the endless sea

                          between two things, without hope, without

a chance it might mean more, become—what? A bridge of sorts?

Some instantly-appearing, rain-pocked shore? Not likely, & still

what could be easier than to step from what seemed like the work

of a thousand suns to a tune about the pleasure of bodies

moving long ago. Even if

                                       Badaboom is all Johnny Mercer said

after he scribbled its lyrics on a napkin while locked in LA traffic,

needing only licensing fees & a rhyme for aurora borealis

before it tumbled into place. The band blistered with indifference

the night I heard it in a Philly jazz dive, phoning in songs

as we sank deeper into

                                      our separate silences & whatever waited

at the bottom of each glass. I’d be lying if I said the room came alive

on that last piece the glassy-eyed singer slurred through, & yet

something happened by the second verse as she let the melody

abruptly collapse, unhinge

                                          from the chords & some of us looked up

& found ourselves strapped to a stillness we could do nothing about.

Warmer than, warmer than, she started to sing, & for a while

repeated just that phrase. As if rapturous, as if unable

to allow the poor pennies that will be the next words drop,

even if all she wanted to conjure were anonymous lips

from a one night stand, what the body felt

                                                                    as flame. By now

there was nothing but brush-stroked snare & the woman wailing

she can’t explain & the one syllable I became a fevered shriek,

in flux across so many disintegrating bars, crumbling, a long ride

& we could all, thank god, go home, instead she let loose a cascade

of indecipherable sounds & we stood more or less stock-still

except for the bass player checking his watch & that guy

in a tank-top screaming for ice in his screwdriver again

& her voice couldn’t stop saying

what by then we knew before

How to explain what quickened the air & gripped us

despite ourselves? To name

                                             what hurled through the crowd

& made us want nothing else just then, made her want to shred

the melody she began, the sole reason that night means anything at all.

In the end what is there to say? When Tchaikovsky spoke

for the first time on the phone just after

                                                                the wires were installed,

he heard his friend’s voice carried over unthinkable miles

& managed only a few words before blurting out it shouldn’t be

possible, that expanse, those human sounds, & hung up

trembling, unable to endure it, heart thrashing wildly in its cage.