Feather Crossing Light

from Opera of the War by Hourloupe

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lyrics

(It is wartime and a composer sits in a ruined theater. His music, like everything else, has been destroyed. Notes resist sequence and abandon harmony. They drift, deaf to one another, suspended in a sonic mobile. He gets an idea: to develop an opera out of these fragments, ashes and disarray. It must be made outside, in the streets. Bodies that live the war will live the music.)


After weeks of bombings and fire
The Opera reopened out-of-doors.
The silence in the hall
Was never really silence: moisture
Dripping into pools left by the firefighters counterpointed
The crash of mortars, a shingle of
Ceiling tin banging into itself, dangling
From a wire, wrenched away
To salvage electrical equipment and lights
For hospitals where the injured lay
Beneath turquoise sheets
As the power surged on,
Then faded, again and again
As if the building were struggling to climb a hill.

The composer sat for days in a red
Velvet chair, stuffing emanating
Between his legs, and stared at the stage
Less in despair and more entranced in the work
Taking shape in his head, a music of shards,
Quanta of sound, notes, but amnesiac kinds,
Quizzically alone, unable to recall where they had
Come from or to form any progressive
Relationships with those following next, notes in isolation.

He imagined dispatching them one by one on the staff,
Lone semaphores unaware of each other, calls
Without responses, voices not exactly singing
But speaking past each other in all the many cadences
And stresses of human body text as they poured
Out of him and halted in the air, suspended
In randomized proximities
Segments in a sound mobile stirred
By a child: what if I blow this way, what if I blow that?
Sometimes touching each other with only a glance
Sometimes t-boning like blind-folded drivers.

Slowly he conceived a new work, the opera to be held
Outside, in the plaza, studded by glass
From shattered brasseries, a dumpster orthogonal
To the decommissioned grand fountain. The Opera
Of the War in body texts it would be called, saying this aloud
To himself as he sat in the cratered theater and a hawk
Unsettled before settling again on a girder and a single feather
Detached and crossed beam-lighted air, in and out
Of blackness, glowing and fading, then falling somewhere.

credits

from Opera of the War, track released January 12, 2024

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Hourloupe

Hourloupe: “I associate it, by assonance, to ‘hurler’ (to roar), to ‘huleler’ (to hoot), to ‘loup’ (wolf).”
—Jean Dubuffet

Hourloupe is a collaboration between writer, musician, and artist Frank Menchaca and Anar Badalov. ... more

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