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Churchsteeple text
Anthony DeMarco
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for Jack Lessard
friend, teacher, composer
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– I –
Sometimes when I look at that church I can sense another time, another
place. It might be many things other than what it actually is. There is one like it on
Amsterdam and 96th. And perhaps another on 3rd and 126th, but that is not more
important than there having been one just like it at some other point in time. Or that it
itself might have been right there at some other moment. Oh, that it could fold me into
its pillared spires and let me observe what it has for so long! All the more so if it might
be and have been at that place and that time. For I could then try and find him, who has
escaped my imagination for so many years. He who set me on that journey toward
Amsterdam. What did he do at eight in the morning? Where did he look for his daily lot
and why did he not despair upon never finding it? Bread, sugar, cigarettes. The next
game of chance to be had for so little and with the promise of so much gain. Listening
to the sounds that shaped his sensibility at any given time, any given place and trying to
make sense of it all so courageously. Sense of sound and syllable made even more
difficult by the lack of sound and reasonable formation in a place from which he had
arrived many years earlier. That time and that place. Foreign sounds and foreign ideals
drive