What Is Playing In Eternity?

It must be separate from its maker,
his leg-gummata and the sound
of dream's Beethoven - pure
bullying of all who love
his 'none-so-great-as-me' outreach,
while the root postition stays
in soul's retreat from syphilis's
demi-moral storm. The music,
like Vespasian's coins, will never smell
of anything behind the foreskin. Time
has told its fractions - use your voice,
this breaking world is crutch enough
to be a scaffold for the nowhere near.

And her description of despair
affords a little time to listen:
she was devoted to a more
oblivious obsession, yet some days
there would be space for music
and a favourite piece would play
among the circling furniture,
beyond the deafness of drawn curtains.
Strange that I can see them, stepping from
the record sleeve, three nuns in habits
inhabiting E Flat,
empowered as angels to command
a truth more generous than love's.

Peter Porter
(c) 2007
Poetry Review, 97:1
Publisher: Poetry Review, London, 2007