Here we go round the prickly pear

"Follow Me Home" is now online at Lone Star Stories.

This is a strange poem for me to read over. It was written in mid-November, when hans_the_bold was staying with me; so far as I can tell, its initial image descended from a dream I'd had in the last week of October (From the next night, all I can remember is a man hanged on barbed wire against the sunset, in the midst of incredible carnage, with King Haggard's unsurprised smile), but I don't know how it transformed from a slightly futuristic battlefield to the trenches of the First World War. The whole week after I'd finished the piece, I read solidly through Wilfred Owen, David Jones, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon. As an exorcism, it didn't work.

(My brother's best friend returned this summer from Iraq. At barely twenty-one, he's a veteran with decorations and scars and he doesn't sleep well at night. For Christmas, I gave him the complete poems of Wilfred Owen, and he already knew "Dulce Et Decorum Est." His commanding officer in country had kept a copy tacked up beside his bed.)

The song that accompanies the poem, although it's the wrong war, is Carol Noonan's "Medal of Mine." I played it looking for a title and then it wouldn't leave my head. ( Who'll tell his mother where her boy died? )

I hope I did somebody justice with this one.

The sun is buried and the stars weep

Gian Carlo Menotti has died.

He wrote some of the strangest and eeriest music I have ever heard or sung. Steal me, sweet thief, for time's flight is stealing my youth. Yes, I know a child the color of earth, the color of thorn. If you're not shy, pin up my hair with your star and buckle my shoe. Horizons! Horizons! There's no guard to kiss or kill. Death's frontiers are free. "The Black Swan" was my standard audition aria for years, a murder ballad with a drowned lover and a bloodied sun and a sleepless, weed-mouthed ghost. Its source opera, The Medium (1946), is a shivery film noir in which the boundaries between childish pantomime and bereaved, believing grief and a charlatan's drunken delusions all blur together into the brush of a cold hand in the dark; The Consul (1950) is a Kafkaesque fever dream of a bureacracy, where a husband can disappear into a paper trail without a trace and the same hopeless figures have inhabited the waiting room for years and even a magician can produce anything out of his pockets—doves, cards, flowers—but the papers he needs to escape. The Old Maid and the Thief (1941) is a self-described "grotesque opera," in which rich old women and ambitious young ones project onto an unassuming traveler every guise from a dashing convict to a kept lover to a stand-in for Death, and Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951) is a miracle play, the night the Three Magi stopped by the home of a lame beggar-child and his mother, following their star toward the east. These aren't even all Menotti's operas, only the ones I know best: and there will be no more. But I am glad of them.

Choose your partner! The dance is on!