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CON
L I T E R A T U R E
.
T H E A T R E
.
A R T
A moan dragged across
gravel, a guitar’s metallic
complaint & shimmy—
these sounds rattle the zodiac,
wail to the mute eruption
& flare of a collapsing star.
Dark
was the Night, Cold
was the Ground
by Blind Willie Johnson—
3 minutes & 15 seconds
of bruised spiritual—
is touring the cosmos
alongside
The Brandenburg
Concerto & Johnny
B. Goode
on the spacecraft
Voyager, the music flanked
by a slew of natural sounds:
surf & thunder, crickets,
a kiss, a heartbeat—
an aural primer
to planet Earth. The world
is phonic. What’s matter—
blueberry, backhoe, the back
of your hand—but the shards
of that primeval sound
when the universe
detonated from the ghost
of a pebble?
On this journey,
any
one
man’s history
is dwarfed
by boundless gulf
& pulsar—Voyager,
long past Pluto,
is 100,000 years
from the next system—
but here you are
on Earth & so it matters
that when Johnson was 7,
his stepmother, aiming
for his father, cast lye
into his face, the price
for his father’s infidelity.
Blinded, he was resigned
to a street corner: the dull
rattle of tips pooling
in a cup, a woman passing
to another running catalogue
of bouquets—husk of sweat, at first,
then salt, then almonds—
her body’s continuous assertions
grown hyperbolic. He could
smell
moods—their delicate
swerves evident as each
nuance of skin’s pit & swell—
smell the fur
before it brushed his arm,
before the woman backed away
in a clatter of heels.
Years later, he could smell
the stench of soaked char
in the ruined pit
of his house. Turned away
from the hospital after the fire
that gutted his roof,
he returned to a rain-soaked
bed of newspaper & soot,
& pneumonia killed him
in the ashes,
beneath a ceiling
not of wood or plaster
but of stars.
What are blues
with no human to hear?
What’s a kiss
or a heartbeat
to that grand sweep
of interplanetary ash
but molecules bumping
molecules? Stranger, unimaginable
intergalactic pilgrim
who’s never even heard
of a tongue,
if you’ve found this note
curled in our million dollar can,
hear the absurdity of our glory
& our pain. Transmute it
into we know not what:
space dust, star kindling.
Restore us back to sound.
Cold was the Ground
Stephen Cramer ’97 is an English professor
at the University of Vermont. “Cold was the
Ground” is from his fifth book, entitled “Bone
Music,” which won the Louise Bogan Award.
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LYCOMING COLLEGE 2017 SPRING MAGAZINE
CON N E C T