Poet's Sampler: Stephen Bluestone Poetry's oldest duty is preservation. The life we live eludes us as we live it, and when we are old we cannot credit what we have lost -- measured by the fragments that we keep. Stephen Bluestone's poems do miraculous things, by force of language directed through his fierce peculiar rhythm; best, they preserve what they value. Because our civilization loves speed, change, loss, and forgetfulness, a poet's obligation is also a poet's opportunity -- to hold and keep, to make a stillness despite noise -- to praise, to celebrate, and to enact endurance. In Stephen Bluestone's old opera singers, in his "afternoon/on its way into history," and in his recovered "Circumstances of the Porch," he provides what the age never demands but deeply requires. -- Donald Hall A Circumstance of the Porch You're in your robe and slippers, and it's just the Sunday paper you want, when someone saying he's your father suddenly slides out from behind the wheel of a blue late-model wagon and a woman calling herself mother waves from the passenger's side, too happy to move. The two of them start unloading bags, gifts, food, a set of electric trains, a box of your old toy soldiers. You can feel the shine coming back to your face, hear white steeples, crystal sets, the cheerful man in the tube talking, the announcer bringing on comedians or singers or this week's mystery-installment. It's a circumstance of the porch. Say hello. Start talking. Smile. You've waited all week for this. First Voices We have a few of their voices, Enrico Caruso's most important of all, but there were others: Luisa Tetrazzini's, for example, as Gilda, recorded in 1911. Why do they move us more than any present sense of who's in the room with us tonight, or will be, soon enough, for the usual pleasant talk, for an hour or so? Is it because theirs are voices never heard before, coins never counted, paintings never seen, stone ships on the waves of a watery world, and we are the last to have known them, the last to recall the first of the speaking dead? At least we think there were visits during which we drank tea, sliced bread on enameled tabletops; we listened to stories, too, on sofas with cushions in needlepoint before fading away into other registers. Not much else that hasn't slipped away from the easy hearing of the present, where our children's children play among their own unfelt sounds. In the empty houses of the immediate, we try to entertain them with our natural voices, small relics of attention, ghosts of bread and butter, tidbits, we hope, of useful talk. Say it's snowing on 57th Street on a particular morning in February, 1904. In a studio in Carnegie Hall, Caruso is singing an aria of Donizetti's; he draws out several passages, and a decision is made to cut two discs, rather than one. Meanwhile, outside, someone we once knew, or think we did, boards a trolley going downtown on Seventh Avenue. Thinking of nothing at the moment, he watches the curb, while, at the same time, across the street, the engineer from Victor Gramophone notes the place where the second disc starts. Un solo istante, Caruso sings, an event in wax, an entry in the sum of all sounds otherwise made but lost. Tonight we listen to that mezzo-voce as if it were the last of our flat and scratchy connections on the turning surface of an old and brittle planet. Anniversary Song Someone's at the door, a surprise. She has green eyes. Another afternoon on its way into history, another surprising afternoon: the letters of Van Gogh, a book about the Third Reich, put aside, along with something I'd begun, half-finished, all sweat, not one line of truth, nothing I wouldn't give up or haven't already given up, to have this, right now. What I have is that bird's nest fern beside the rocker, cut irises in the blue swirl vase, and this company. Let the music take care of itself. This is what I have. This is what I want. I do, I keep saying, I do, I do. "Beethoven Does Not Lie Here" Franz Schubert's last words Mornings when he wrote, his hand flawless across the page, the night's chat at Bogner's Cafe or the Anchor Tavern yawned like sleep into the wide sky; Vienna danced and sang; the brass bands in the Prater, the organ-grinders, signed themselves in voices. Like the deaf master whom he loved, he raised the dark indefinite body of sound up from its bones, its triple-flesh, finishing what Goethe and Schiller had only begun, turning flat speech, stiff tropes, and inadequate rhymes into the poems of poems. Alpine scores ran through his brain, evenings of generous accompaniment, and improvised waltzes, too; he saw wildflowers dance on a paper field; carriages crossed the green of his eye; high clouds bunched in the heavy skies; the chill November rain still held his quick flammable ear to the flame. Thomson's Gazelle speed, along with circuits for escape, elusiveness in the open field, sure hoofs for sidetracking, a torso that can change direction midair, lyrate horns, coat with coloring the color of horizon on the open plain, along with judgment quick enough to know danger an instant before it strikes from the tall grass that edges the way to water-- but not useless imagination, not innocence, not one question out of its windpipe that a child might ask, or a poet move his slow tongue to answer, unless the sky, too, were locked in his throat.