Taxes and the wild beat of April

I filed our taxes electronically yesterday, and in about a week the internal revenue service will return the favor and make an electronic deposit of $172 in our bank account. And that’s all I’ll say about taxes, other than to recall that when I was in my early 20s, living, it seemed, on many edges simultaneously, I’d be shaken from sleep repeatedly around tax time by nightmares of doing jail time for tax fraud. That was 40 years ago. It may be that I never will be audited by the IRS, and I can only hope that it will be another 40 before the Great Auditor comes to look at my books. But speaking of books, our daughter-in-law Crissy Liu brought a strange little black daily calendar book back from Germany and presented it to me as a Christmas gift this year. Its title is Kalendarium toter Musiker, imprinted on the black cloth cover in small, somber gold leaf letters. There’s an additional title in English, The Beat Goes On, which is not, pretty obviously, a literal translation of the German. At the bottom of each day’s blank page you’ll find the names and brief bios of several musicians who died on that day. Today, for example, being Mittwoch, April 14, (I don’t know from German, but mittwoch sounds suspiciously like “midweek”, doncha think?) I find “2005: John Fred (8.5.1945) Sanger der John Fred & His Playboy Band, deren Parodie auf “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” mit dem Titel “Judy in Disguise with Glasses” einst die Beatles von der US-Chart-Spitze etc.
As I said, I don’t know from German, but I do know that a calendar book called The Beat Goes On which marks the deaths of musicians is, for me, a poignant and daily reminder that though Death will whack each of us, there ain’t nothin that stops the music. This odd little book also provides us with a recurrent feature titled Death of the Week. While almost all of the Deaths of the Week are in German, and thus escape my understanding, this week’s Death is in English, and begins, “What do you call a six foot two Australian with a steel plate in his skull, the profile of a neanderthal, the sensitivity of an artist and a blues voice from God? The Guv’nor. What do you call a man who battles terminal cancer for five years, while still managing to play concerts and bring up three kids? A hero. Bruno Adams, born in Bacchus Marsh, Australia, 1963, was one of those rare human beings with a hot-wire to the soul…etc.”
Which for no reason I can put my finger on brings to mind that Dylan Thomas line, which, just because it is one of most oft-quoted lines in poetry in no way diminishes its spooky power: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower… .” That force, really a vibration at the molecular level, is what drives the yellow forsythia out of its bud, the lilac from its twig, the green shoot of garlic from its clove, and puts the wild beat back into the wings of the ruffed grouse. And it’s that beat I’m listening to just now, around 7 a.m., writing on the porch here in Waterloo, as the ruffed grouse in the woods across the road claps his wings to the tune of his lust. His beat produces a deep, almost sub-audible bass note like the phoomf of hiphop trailing a car on the road. He beats his wings once, then again a second later, then again a half second later, then a quarter second, scaling the rhythm up until he’s producing a continuous thrum, a deep sonic blur that I hear with my heart more than my ear. It is the wild beat of April, the beat that goes on and on. Hear me, O Great Auditor. You can whack us but you can never, through all Eternity, whack our music.