His Master’s Voice
2018; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/thr.2018.0105
ISSN1939-9774
Autores ResumoHis Master’s Voice Meredith Bergmann (bio) . . . if hearing and listening were the same. —James Merrill, “The Victor Dog” A dog is listening to the dead.His master’s brother played his master’s voice, from a wax recording.The dog sat down and all but stuck his headinto the trumpet of the afterlife. His master’s brother painted them,setting the eager, ashen dog, the gleaming brass machineagainst dark velvet and mahogany.They float on black on my computer screen. Is there no comfort in the past?The dog is listening for commands, his name, or for approval,something to make his pose make sense at last—his master trying to play Beethoven. Hearing her practice “Für Elise,”my mother-in-law’s teacher in Vienna told her then,“You sound like you have never been in love.”She thinks she was eleven, maybe ten. I fell in love when I was five,bewildering my mother: “You can’t be,” I think she said.She silenced me. His voice, his laugh, survivein jumbled fragments that are hard to play. And now I find his name online.There’s video: a dog cavorting with a tall, slim man—my childhood love, the master of that dog?His voice is wrong—the rhythm doesn’t scan. [End Page 613] His dog begins to bark for joy.Then, loud and close, a chuckle from the unseen cameraman:I recognize the timbre of that boywhen he says, finally with pride, “Good girl!” That’s all I ever longed to hear.Now put the screen to sleep. Put “Für Elise” on instead,the soothing trills; the octaves in the bassinsistent, like pronouncements of the dead. [End Page 614] Meredith Bergmann MEREDITH BERGMANN is a sculptor whose publications include Barrow Street, Contemporary Poetry Review, Hudson Review, Light, The New Criterion, TriQuarterly, and the anthology Hot Sonnets. She was poetry editor of American Arts Quarterly from 2006–2017. Her chapbook “A Special Education” was published in 2014 by EXOT Books. Copyright © 2018 Meredith Bergmann
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