WRIT WHEN I FOUND OUT HIS WAS AN UNMARKED GRAVE
Children children don't you know
Mozart has no where to go
This is so
Though graves be many
He hasn't any
-Gregory Corso, 1960
This poem is important to me in the way that the soundtrack is important to a Hollywood chase sequence. Tuba Mirum, the third movement of his Requiem, was trombone fluttering down from the upstairs like a moth from Chris Burns's bedroom during a young moment of love in 2000, and Dies Irae when there was a skull that same year. And besides these memories, deeper down, I feel the vibrations in me from performing the Lacrymosa in St. Paul's Cathedral in Cambridge in 1998.
Deeper still is Summer 1995 when I stood in Salzburg, Austria in a floral gravel graveyard. Rain pelted my probable poncho in a thick and dreary guzzle. This was the grayest day, cement sky. My grandparents and I ducked ankle high in the mudrot of the corpses beneath us, dozens of mass graves from the 18th century; Vienna's best approximation of where his bones are.
I was gifted the poetry book of Gregory Corso's creation in 2004 by my friend Kaitlin JB, a personal Moriarty of mine, the event falling in place and line with my beat discovery of '03 and the calamities thereupon. The book is called Long Live Man.
On the first page of it is the poem entitled Man (Prologue to what was to be a long long poem), and it's telling that in the margins I penciled "express and admirable".
