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David Landon: Bach, Onomatopoeia, and the Wreck

September 19, 2022 by PBQ Leave a Comment

For all we knew, it was a random chunk

of interstellar rock, the rear-end crash

that brought us to a halt. Dinner was out,

of course, and the Bach too, I realized,

feeling it in my neck, and standing there

in the rain, examining my totaled car,

the guilty driver soaked, in tears. The cops

were nice enough, did what they had to do

efficiently. The wrecker did show up,

eventually, and we began to cope.

And since it’s now collision story time,

the word I’m hearing in my head is ‘thud’.

 

There’s ‘clunk’, of course, or ‘jolt’, ‘wham-bang’, or ‘thwack’.

‘Thwack’ has that sudden, can’t-be-happening feel,

as in, “I was just sitting, reading Kant,

when suddenly, inside my head, I felt

this ‘thwack’, and everything went blank.” But no!

The word that truly bongs the knell is ‘thud’,

essence—onomatopoetically—

of impact, ‘thud’, from dice, to hand-grenade,

to asteroid. We need the stupid ‘d’

of ‘doo-doo’, ‘dodo’, ’dude’, or ‘dud’, or ‘dead’.

‘You’re-done-for-d’ is what we’re up against;

you never know when out of nowhere, ‘thud’!

 

But on the other hand, there’s Bach: the Bach

we missed, the works for cello solo. Bach:

initial ‘b’, a kind of plosive bump,

terminal ‘ch’, a bit of friction in

the throat, but in between the ‘b’ and ‘ch’,

the ‘ah’, release: sustained and open, ‘ah’.

Think of the bow colliding with the string,

a subtle thud, a scrape, and out floats Bach,

genial Bach-analia of dark

and light, a theory of the universe

as music: bang, and then the sarabande,

the minuet, the allemande, the gigue.

Filed Under: Issue 102, Poetry, Poetry 102 Tagged With: David Landon

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