Night by Rick Mullin
Every angel is terrifying ~Rainer Maria Rilke
When I opened for Los Dildos at the Y,
I knew I’d get my ass kicked. They had horns
and huge cojones. And a different guy
on drums. Their singer wore a crown of thorns
(a little heavy on the metaphor)
and introduced himself as Caliban.
“This isn’t going to be your night,” he said.
He grabbed a cold one from the garbage can
and greened-out where the spotlight turns to red.
Establishing the five chord on the four,
I couldn’t feel the strings. I let it slide.
The loners at the bar looked good to go—
the singer’s girlfriend actually cried.
I heard the one-time drummer moanin’ low
beside the lowing Angels at the door.
Beside the lowing Angels at the door
you have, of course, the Calibaniere,
fallen rebels sliding on the floor
who failed in flight. Their pain is temporary,
captured nonetheless in full effect.
Brueghelian bounce and broken bouncers all.
The emblematic owl and dragon’s claw
depict the prosecution of a fall.
One bloated fish, one lion down by law,
whereat we pause a moment to reflect.
[beat]
They had another guy on drums. And horns
to make the high notes in a wamups scree
go bang; a porkpie hat that now adorns
a lady tattooed with a burning tree,
the girlfriend in a garden of neglect.
The girlfriend in a garden of neglect
(pure metaphor) arrived from Cincinnati,
swine metropolis in retrospect,
in 1984, done up in khaki.
But she wore an angel’s shoes that matched
her Ellingtonian reserve and poise.
She said it without saying it so much.
No flags. The art world was a den of boys
to which the girlfriend brought a mother’s touch.
And soon enough the Dildos were attached.
She worked them from the bar, gray eminence;
she fed them lines and also counted off.
A band of less experience than innocence
was coming off like Rimsky-Korsakov.
But there was yet a dragon to be hatched.
The basilisk, the one that hadn’t hatched,
greened out inside its color-coded shell:
the mind of Caliban was jerry-patched
to mask his orchestrated dives to hell.
A drum and bass were moving in the pocket.
Everything was tight, but rotting from within.
A flatted four defined the outer reach,
constraining Aldo Klein on mandolin.
The paradox of Einstein on the beach:
The golden egg parabola, a locket
and the “ain’t no lines in nature” jive
suggest the “Quandrum of the Other Side.”
A message from the bar read slide to five.
The rhythm section shuddered and complied
as Larry on guitar got up to rock it.
When Larry on guitar sets up to rock it,
everything goes blue. His Reverb amp
defies the static and the thunder. Clock it,
measure every bar. It’s true. The stamp
of time, the edge of irony. The howl.
He puts it down. To wit, that night in Dallas,
Pennsylvania, where the sidewalk stops:
The Pentecostals in a pine board palace
up the street immediately called the cops
when Larry bade his Telecaster growl.
That weekend in the can was a constraint
that failed to formulate a roadhouse yell.
But time inside is time inside. “There ain’t
no lines in nature, boys. It’s just as well,”
said Larry, turbaned in a jailhouse towel.
A turbine engine and a jailhouse towel.
A roadmap conjuring the big Midwest.
An Indiana flatness, hidden waterfowl
and more explosive elements to test
the mettle of a heavy metal band.
The burning Buddha and a burning man
in grapple stance and not-too-phony smoke
require the guidance of a dragoman
for any life form at the edge. A cloak
of darkness closeted in sunlit sand
on either coast completes the border wall.
And there you have it. Dildos hit the stage
in battle garb, in ink and alcohol.
You dig? Or do you simply turn the page
and carry on with life as you had planned?. . .
I carried on with life as I had planned,
a solo act: harmonica, guitar,
the occasional hurdy-gurdy, alto and
recorder. Once (and only once) sitar.
They’d thrown me out of Nouvelle Pomp the day
our debut album dropped. I got the “new
direction” kiss-off. “Any would suffice,”
I mocked, and packed my yellow Subaru.
That album, Pfrank, included “Edelweiss,”
my ode to white. It doesn’t get much play
on college radio. Perhaps that’s good—
I kinda like it when they draw a blank.
A multi-instrumentalist, I stood
alone on stage, resigned to putting Pfrank
behind me at the Uphill Cabaret.
Behind me at the Uphill Cabaret
a Fender Reverb Twin, the amplifier
Larry lugged along the motorway
when Everyman was living on a tire
and (surprisingly, foreshadowing. . .) a prayer.
I recognized the axman’s signature,
“Memento Mori,” burned into the vinyl—
The heavy-handed man’s imprimatur,
the frank magnificence of all things final.
Those decals of the Dead and Slayer
were added by another hand. But whose?
And when? And why? “House amp,” said a drummer
for the headline act, the Existential Blues.
“I guess the guy who owned it hit his number.”
Well drummers come and go, but Larry is a player. . . .
Hell, drummers disappear! But Larry. . . is a player.
Unlikely he’d just suddenly decamp.
Los Dildos’ patent leather lammergeier
would not abandon such a storied amp.
“How long has it been sitting there?” I asked.
But the Existential drummer was no more.
Alone on stage I thought about the crowd.
The crowd was waiting, heavy at the door.
The green room was beginning to get loud,
The Uphill Cabaret crew multitasked.
The night was good to go, and I went first.
I opened wide and closed with “Edelweiss.”
The Existentials, likely unrehearsed,
started several numbers over twice.
The singer slouched in seraph feathers, masked.
Louche seraphim in feathers mask
the far basilica. The foreground dark,
the middle field, a hay-gold meadow, gasps
below the mountains and the sky. “!Hark!”
it prays. A novice monk replies in kind,
his lute communicating with angelic strings
just out of hearing range. Memento Mori
reads a cloud line band. The novice sings
a new rendition of the same old story:
Our hero leaves his Fender amp to find
a better stage, a more receptive base.
The landscape is a dream within a dream.
The hooded novice doesn’t show his face.
In landscape paintings, no one hears you scream.
Not so in the cathedral of the mind.
And so, the green cathedral of the mind,
the pentagram that Leonardo drew,
a canticle uncannily designed
for human voice and playing through,
inverted with the head of Baphomet:
Thus Caliban, unfettered and unplugged,
Vitruvian in burning forest green,
a basilisk in smoke, alive and drugged,
emerges from the oriental screen
and lunges through the Dildos’ second set,
no longer shadow play.
[More light. More light . . .]
Then counting off (and counting up to five),
he howls, “This isn’t going to be your day!”
Or is it night? Again the Dildos come alive,
Promethean. This isn’t over yet.
The problem is, this isn’t over yet.
We haven’t seen the last of Nouvelle Pomp ~
their sophomore outing, Balzac Tourniquet,
sees action on the charts and at the Stomp.
And now that Brother Larry reads the sky,
he’s likely to deliver on those psalms
he promised in his last encyclical.
There’s little respite from the dry ice bombs
at Uphill Cabaret. Though not admissible,
the groaning testimony of the guy
who used to bang the drum portends a round
of rhythm section shuffle, and the girlfriend’s
tears may show up in the lost and found.
It’s sloppy. But my reminiscence ends
the night I opened for Los Dildos at the Y.
Rick Mullin is a painter and writer living in northern New Jersey. His poetry has appeared in various journals and anthologies including American Arts Quarterly, The New Criterion, Measure, The Raintown Review, Ep;phany, Bad Lillies, Unsplendid, and Rabbit Ears: TV Poems. His books include Soutine (Dos Madres, 2012), Sonnets from the Voyage of the Beagle (Dos Madres, 2014), Lullaby and Wheel (Kelsay Books, 2019), Huncke (second edition, Exot Books, 2021). His new collection, Grotesque Singers, was published by Dos Madres this year. His paintings are in collections in the U.S., Canada, England, Germany, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, the British Virgin Islands and Australia.
Praise for the winning sonnet crown: “Night” has many things going for it: rollicking energy, vivid atmosphere, a first-rate dildo joke, and a heart. In twelve stanzas, the poem summons up a small yet unforgettable world—a fever dream of heavy-metal rockers, scenesters, “louche seraphim,” all-too-patient girlfriends, and drummers who “come and go” (think Prufrock or Spinal Tap). The speaker knows this world well and casts an affectionate eye on its hopes and failures. The result is part Rilke, part road trip, and part shaggy-dog story. The stage smoke may be phony, but the tears are real. As for the “crown,” it’s right there in the first sonnet, on the head of a dude named Caliban. Like everything in the poem, it’s either wickedly funny or poignant, depending on your angle as an audience member.
~Austin Allen, Judge