Decadence: A Mapping / Jishin-no-ben

1.

In music school, you learn there are four types 
of cadences in classical music: authentic, half,

plagal, and deceptive. You wonder how many 
centuries it takes for Western ears to acclimate

to these constructed cycles of harmonic tension, 
climax, release. How many other patterns in art

are mimetic—synthetic doppelgängers to mirror 
biological cycles of vitality and decay? Do we create

these dress rehearsals for resolution because we fear 
death, or because we’re secretly interested? 
                                       (memento mori)

2.

You think of fin de siècle decadence: perversity, 
death, decline, and decay—the rise of the monstrous

to flood the interregnum between sociocultural 
movements. Is this anything like our recent fetish

for zombies and vampires—as late-stage capitalism 
capitulates to a violently unraveling dystopianism?

But cadence, too, is the rhythm for military marches, 
the iambs of our heartbeats, the circadian cycles

of climate. Is decadence a kind of de-cadencing? 
A falling out of step with the rhythms of the planet?

3.

The sound of dog-day cicadas in late August 
a sharp swirl of noise, like hot metal skewering

through humidity, blotting out a sense of sky. 
Rising and falling. Rising and falling. The decadence

of summer, burning itself out and leaving 
behind the translucent exuvium of molted shells:

chitinous palimpsests, ghosted former selves. 
What will happen when the monarch butterflies

those tiny orange hinges, bright with milkweed 
poison, no longer come to open the door into fall?

4.

Your mother keeps falling out of her bed 
in the middle of the night and breaking pieces

of herself: a toe, a fractured wrist, three cracked 
ribs. What does it say about gravity if one can fall

in the middle of the night while asleep and lying 
down? What does it say about ground zero?

Where is your mother going to, in the night, 
before she suddenly comes hurtling back down

into her fading shell of a body that seems more 
delicate, more see-through, with each passing day?

5.

In fall, the brilliant suns of aspen a gold burning 
around the hairpin turns of the Snowy Range.

Their leaves are giving up their chlorophyll. 
They stop reflecting green light, and slowly turn

to yellow embers. When their veins begin to harden 
and shut down, scar tissue forms at the base

of the leaf. The connection between leaf and tree 
weakens. Abscission: when gravity, or wind,

detaches the leaf and—without memory, without 
family, without language, without self—it falls.