Liberation of Dissonance

Bruce Bond

Homage to Arnold Schoenberg

It’s what he called his work, his liberation,
as if each note he heard might break the threads
of gravity, might burn a bit and darken
as he took his nightly walk, in his head

some hymn without a fulcrum, a native key.
And how Promethean it sounded then,
it sounds still, to take the giant tree
that is a tonal root and its extensions

and rip the thirsty tendrils from the planet.
But it wasn’t so. Or if you called it
freedom, it was a vast and blackened net
drifting, without center, perhaps, but not

without regime, as if one government
rose through the congress of another.
So bound to dissonance, so beauty-bent,
the tones spoke among themselves like numbers.

Sweet, yes. Unnerving, at first, especially;
though they undid themselves in the heat
of his insomnia, those nights his country
woke in smoke and sirens, a thing apart.

Or later as he stood on the sharp prow
dividing the exiled waters of his stare,
the red stamp of the passport (for now
at least) drowned in a still Atlantic of stars.