Counting Out Strange Cadences

Grateful Dead: 12/28/79

12/28/84

It was all of this:
The beat and the heat
and the neat repeat
of the notes which poured
from the congohelium,
metal never made for music,
matter and anti-matter
locked in a fine magnetic grid
to ward off the outermost
perils of space.
Now a piece of it was deep
in the body of Old Earth,
counting out strange cadences.
The churn and the burn
and the hot return of music
riding the living rock,
accompanying itself
in an air-carried echo.
The surge and the urge
of an erotic dirge
which moaned, groaned through the heavy stone.
--Cordwainer Smith