On Day 641 of the daily poems our poet Pam Job beams in from France with an evocation of Messiaen’s ‘La Transfiguration’. Messiaen’s soul clambers from his music. Jesus is radiant in glory.
Seigneur
Olivier Messiaen, La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur, Jesus Christ
I am listening to Messiaen’s soul clambering
from his music, note by note, to hazard
sheer rock face, one handhold replacing another.
He’s showing us how he converses with his deity.
Simple, he sings, use all the notes at once. Listen,
isn’t this the hardest hearing you have ever done?
Birds line up on branches to hear him –
he can tune his notes to theirs. His longest chord
could wrap easily around our world.
Cymbals clash, a meteor hits its target,
earth. Our ears scramble to locate it.
A voice rises from the crater, hymning
its own fall. Stars try out their voices
up and down the scale of heaven.
The music draws breath – a resonance,
a sounding brass echoes in the silence –
a clock continues its crawl through the hours,
tik, tok, tik, voices climb the tiered notes, up
and down the rungs of sound; and then a pulse
of yearning from part of you, longing, longing
for the music never to end – but then it does.
Something has happened
to tilt earth towards us again.
It’s his endless farewell.
Pam Jo