Tashi, for RCA Victor “Gold Seal”; recorded December 1975; CD re-issue August 1989.
“Conceived and written during the course of my captivity, the Quartet for the End of Time was performed for the first time in Stalag 8-A on January 15, 1941…” – Olivier Messiaen
Cluster: The Movements
to praise
the angel who
announces liturgy
of crystal rainbow vocalise
abyss
of birds
an interlude
the immortality
of Jesus time eternity
the dance
of who
announces end
the seven trumpets end
the angel Jesus fury time
to praise
The Music
Begins
with intricate
piano voicings, like
a jazz quartet three-quarters put
to death;
a score
for "Twilight Zone,"
the episode in which
the sheltering conceit will thin,
snuff out;
a march
of ghosts and matched
inexorably, as
I listen, by a siren blocks
away.
He writes
that "the abyss
is Time"; opposing it
he posits birds: seraphic Grand
Guignol;
the spry
ebullient squawks
of Aristophanes'
besieged by shrieks of Hitchcocks'. He
enquires
through bursts
of withering
melodic schism, none
the less contemplative, beyond
the Word
itself;
instead, upon
a human chaos scrawled,
between its lines, in failure; then
allows
this Word's
harsh verities,
and none the less abstract,
its pallid "Everlastingness,"
to mount.
He says
he hears, in dreams –
submits to – "vectors," the
"unreal." Of "superhuman" war
what would
have Freud
construed? From dreams
to unreality…
time signatures unhinging at
time's end.
Of Him?
A tangency
remote and warm, sans text;
a dimly atmospheric sense
of thanks;
throughout
is brought to bear
the queasy quietude
of sturdy faith put sensibly
to use.
What was
it to have heard
this piece played there and then?
What had been lately done to earn
such praise?
Cover Art: The Angel
To preach,
interpret, forge
translations of transla-
tions – scores and scores; the centuries
will change
this much,
transpose it, as
your nihilists' conceits
aflame and smokeless at my heels.
What will
what will
surcease in an
apparent nothingness
contrive to mean? What will you know?
O cool
this soft
blue ocean, from
the figure of my step
irradiating! Scrawled are these
that you
will know,
these figures of
this motion, mysteries –
how many consummate within
an end
of that
which figures their
own measurement? And my
own essence is such mystery:
consumed
when solved;
consummate in
salvation; in the weak,
imprisoned by configurements
engaged
with time's
extremity –
O then enumerate
those trumpets true! You will know what
and why!
— Charles Leggett is a professional actor based in Seattle, WA, and a 2022 Lunt-Fontanne Fellow. His chapbook Hard Listening appears in the latest Ravenna Press “Triple” series edition, No. 25. Charles’s co-adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths premiered in 2024 at Intiman Theatre with The Seagull Project, and his poetry film short To Fondle Nothing has screened as an Official Selection at film festivals in the US, the UK (Scotland and England), Portugal, Serbia, Italy, and Austria.