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    Semitones
    Semitones
    Semitones
    Ebook161 pages2 hours

    Semitones

    By Derek Furr

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    About this ebook

    Suite for Three Voices is a dance of prose genres, teeming with intense human life in all its humor and sorrow. A son uncovers the horrors of his father’s wartime experience, a hitchhiker in a muumuu guards a mysterious parcel, a young man foresees his brother’s brush with death on September 11. A Victorian poetess encounters space aliens and digital archives, a runner hears the voice of a dead friend in the song of an indigo bunting, a teacher seeks wisdom from his students’ errors and Neil Young. By frozen waterfalls and neglected graveyards, along highways at noon and rivers at dusk, in the sound of bluegrass, Beethoven, and Emily Dickinson, the essays and fiction in this collection offer moments of vision and aspire to the condition of music.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFomite
    Release dateApr 3, 2020
    ISBN9781942515296
    Semitones
    Author

    Derek Furr

    Derek Furr teaches literature and directs the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Bard College. He is the author of a collection of fiction and essays, Suite For Three Voices (Fomite 2012), and a work of literary criticism, Recorded Poetry and Poetic Reception From Edna Millay to the Circle of Robert Lowell (Palgrave MacMillan 2010). He grew up in rural North Carolina and now lives in the Hudson Valley with his family.

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      Book preview

      Semitones - Derek Furr

      Dawn Chorus

      Aubade

      Leaves like lashes fluttered around the robin, grey-breasted

      before sunrise, an eye for the maple, also grey, to observe

      with me a spider securing the lasts of its web to hosta stalks

      against the breeze.

      Then came the mechanical elephant in a waistcoat

      walking erect, drumming, in the attitude of one

      reciting multiplication tables at the end of third grade.

      Okay, I shall suffer courageously, pledged the damselfly

      caught in the orb, glad of an audience and rhythm.

      The robin dove at the elephant. The spider descended.

      Blind, the maple greened.

      The Annunciation to Mary of Upstate New York (as she prepared her essay for ART 554 Women in Renaissance Religious Painting)

      Appearing at first as a wren, the angel in a noiseless transmutation reached its full size and form as it entered my room from its perch on the windowsill. Just as the Old Masters have shown, it had wings and a halo, but otherwise its features were human and androgynous, its delicacy and unblemished skin conventionally feminine, its stature and assertiveness masculine. Its wings, rooted at the scapulae, classed it with the Gabriels of Fra Lippo Lippi and Fra Giovanni Angelico, in whose Annunciations the feathers are brightly colored. Extending the full length of its body, the wings remained always extruded, even when the angel was at rest, awaiting my response to its message.

      Remarking the unsurpassed beauty of Fra Giovanni’s figures, Vasari argues that in painting the sanctified, one is obligated to show a perfection far beyond that of the fallen world. He parts ways with those who, seeing figures of women or youths adorned with loveliness or beauty beyond the ordinary, straight-way censure them and judge them licentious, although he does allow that nudity has no place in church paintings, even although a man has to show how much he knows.

      That is not at all how it happened, although the angel was initially a wren and the wings did resemble Gabriel’s from the San Marco Annunciation of Angelico. The casement shattered during the transmutation and drove a splinter the size of a pencil into the angel’s right hip. There was no blood but the screech, while surely justified, was nonetheless infernal, not what one might expect from a being sent, presumably, from above. Without forethought, I grabbed the splinter and pulled it out, sending a spray of electric sparks across the room that singed the rug in several spots. Apologetic and grateful, the angel touched lightly down, and as we discussed its message, the burns repaired themselves in its aura.

      While William Michael Rossetti has nothing to say about a saint’s state of undress or an artist’s pretensions to forbidden knowledge, he would have preferred to find a blemish or a look of mild consternation among the elect in Angelico’s paintings. Noting that Angelico’s art is pietistic, Rossetti writes in his 1911 Britannica entry on the painter, His visages have an air of rapt suavity, devotional fervency and beaming esoteric consciousness, which is intensely attractive to some minds and realizes beyond rivalry a particular ideal—that of ecclesiastical saintliness and detachment from secular fret and turmoil.

      There was no transmutation. The wren, Thryothorus ludovicianus, was a juvenile female. Her halo, which resembled a wedding band, clinked the windowpane. I declared myself a skeptic. Against the glass the wren pressed the underside of her wing, which was lined with iridescent feathers that refracted the lamplight. I opened the window. It was cold. The wren fluttered in and lit on the frayed spine of a dictionary, the floor being crowded with leaning towers of books. From her beak dangled a pink thread, woolen, as if unraveled from a winter mitten.

      Angelico’s Mary, in his many treatments of the Annunciation, stands outside both of these descriptions, having neither a figure of celestial beauty nor a face that beams esoteric consciousness. Shoulders narrow and rounded, hands loosely crossed in front of her abdomen, she gazes at the messenger with quiet concern. She is pensive and plain, that is her beauty. She will not break into song. There is in the deep background at her eye level a small window beyond an open doorway. It looks onto a dark forest. She does not turn to it, but it centers our gaze as the eye of the angel centers hers. I have concentrated on that window, and I have begun to see its purpose and what lies beyond it.

      The wren, God’s messenger, came through the window and placed the thread in my palm. She sang these words to me, Your heart is a nest, a gathering of this and that into perfect form, in which the slightest pink thread, snatched by a mother from her child’s unraveling mitten and dropped in the slush, contributes tensity, warmth, even extravagance. The color of this nest, the weave of aluminum foil and broomstraw, none of this is incidental. Within is a wren, watchful, but its eyes glint with the curiosity of the unafraid, settled as in the palm of a hand, free to fly or be quietly enclosed. Her curved beak can spear the spider, a delicacy. And as an emblem of the heart’s chambers, in the nest there are four eggs, smooth and densely freckled as the cheeks of a redhead, secret and hopeful. Without melancholy she broods, for she has made all this.

      So I came to understand why I had been studying these paintings, why I loved Angelico’s Mary, her serious eyes, her hands like my hands, folded as sea waves that gather

      to a place of overlap, or as the tips of a wren’s wings that cross when she rests, and I set aside my papers and my books, for my hands O Lord are yours to increase, to speed,

      to warm, to put to use.

      Become A Light

      1.

      Sean snapped his briefcase as he stood in the doorway of the bedroom. He had raised the blind, and the sunlight filtering through the hydrangea made shadow puppets on Alanis’ bedsheet. Her body was tiny and crumpled beneath it. The black mass of her hair washed up on her pillow and covered her face.

      I have to go give the final exam, Alanis. I’ll come home as soon as it’s over. I love you. We can figure this out.

      Was she asleep? Threads of black floated and descended. So she was breathing. Ghostly animals scurried along her motionless form.

      Alanis had stopped getting out of bed, and Sean didn’t know what else to do. He had already taken two sick days this week to keep watch on her. She wouldn’t eat or drink. She wouldn’t respond to anything he said. Even now, when he squeezed her foot gently as a gesture of farewell, she just lay there facing the wall. He pulled the door closed behind him.

      Sean did not know that Alanis had miscarried. He had not, in fact, known that she was pregnant. She had not been far along, but she had grown hopeful and intended to keep the baby despite the fact that Sean was not the father. Algie Williams was.

      Algie had seduced her at their 20-year high school reunion. Or rather, Alanis had led him to believe she was seduced. It made him incautious, which is what she needed. She knew he would disappear back to the west coast the next morning and not rear his manhood near her again for at least a decade. Under the influence of five bourbon and gingers, she had been liberated into this solution to her and Sean’s childlessness. Although the odds were obviously against her, Algie was nothing if not virile. She had gambled that his sperm would strike the bullseye if anyone’s could.

      She and Algie had not dated each other in high school, just pursued ways of having sex furtively while going steady with Sean and Beata. No one knew, so no one suffered. Sean and Algie were drafted shortly after graduation. Algie broke up with Beata, and Sean and Alanis got engaged. When Sean returned from Vietnam, Alanis had become pregnant right away with Lily. It was to be the start of a big family. They had bought the green-trimmed Cape Cod near St. Joseph’s, the high school where Sean got a position teaching history. Five bedrooms were more than they could afford on Sean’s salary at the time, but Alanis’ parents made up the difference. During Alanis’ pregnancy, as an infant, as a toddler, Lily had been sweet and easy. She had thick, jet-black hair, enough for a ribbon by the time she was twenty months old and Alanis was pregnant again.

      Then, over Thanksgiving, 1977, Sean brought home the flu. It killed Lily and caused Alanis’ first miscarriage. Alanis tried not to blame Sean, and Sean tried to reason himself out of accepting blame. But the presumption of guilt settled on him. Intimacy, in its fumbling and desperate returns, brought no more children. In the beginning, it hadn’t mattered. To Alanis, the idea of new children was an offense against those she had lost. How dare she love another? And for that matter, the risk of more loss was so present to her that she could hear it scratching at the windowpane when she and Sean made love. Sorrow and fear were slow to abate. Now, nearly fifteen years after Lily’s death, Alanis felt a fool for her new ache. Hadn’t they been fortunate in other ways? The house was paid for. Her real estate business was steady and occupied much of her time. Sean was chair of the history department at St. Joseph’s. She and Sean had formed a sad but loving friendship that could sustain them into old age. The fact is that a scrim of disappointment shaded even the brightest couples among their friends. Alanis concluded that at least Sean’s and her dimness had a source one could point to.

      But the ache. A baby, one she could claim to be theirs, would assuage it. She and Sean could begin again, however belatedly, without rehearsing their regrets and lacing their bed with yet more anxiety. She hadn’t seen or even talked to Algie before the night of the reunion. The plan came to her in the moment. Then

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