In the Name of Heaven

Poor rich Pachelbel
depending upon what measure

his canon’s bass
coopted again and again
even by rock groups, an electric
Taiwanese teenager, and now
an Amazon ad, or perhaps not
since any theory tyro
recalls transcribing that bass
for a lesson in elementary harmony.

Still, an empty news cycle
can often find some pundit
speculating over the canon’s
enduring popularity. It has even
joined the Hallelujah Ninth
as a subject for flash mob contrivance.

Does it speak peace on earth
unto the heathen, calm at the heart
of storms? Did a widely heard FM broadcast
once stop New York City traffic?
Or is it merely music? And what, after all is that
but a congeries of dreams gone soft, gone wild
gone ballistic?

What are the dreams of music, where
do they lead, to heaven or hell, to some
great original whose thoughts we hear
and do not hear

      or to the hearts
we carefully conceal, whose wishes
could perhaps have rebuilt Pachelbel’s
free imperial city of Nuremberg
ruined in Hitler’s war, but where
postwar war crimes trials were held
instead by Allies who, desperate for an end
had recently destroyed it.