Nocturnes


Raindrops strike the island leaves like toddlers’
fingers on innumerable keys:
passion piano, fury forte. In her
bedroom his mistress uncrosses her legs,
lights up a cigar, and scribbles another
thirty pages on free love—to put down
her conscience perhaps, because, comme les bourgeois,
she believes productivity justifies all.
Chopin had small hands, but then the keys
were smaller too.  When did pianos grow big
keys, and why?  The way Rubinstein plays you
think this has got to be what Chopin heard
as he sat, coughing and calculating,
heard with full heart just before, with precise
pen, he set down these diaphanous dances
for Franco-Polish nymphs.
                                 He wrote the first
in Mama’s Warsaw, three years before he
moved to Papa’s Paris to triumph as
a fragile lion of the salons,
irresistible with his comme-il-faut
name and accent séduisant. Twenty years
later came the last.  A whole career of
moods realized for the rising breasts of
des femmes romantiques for whom peignoirs
are pressed, erecting these iron armatures
festooned with feathers.
                                The beauty of illness
is rarefied but persuasive. Is it
the effusions of his nightly sickness
that make health feel coarse and daylight crude?
 



 
Barcarolle


The black gondola suavely beckons, a
luxury not to be missed.  So you nod,
step gingerly aboard, and let yourself
sink into the plush throne. The masked city
is sinking too, dissolving in the foul
water where even sodden newsprint and
rotten fruit are almost ennobled by
St. Mark’s dome and those phallic lions.
You’re rocked and rolled under pastel clouds
in the ineffably soft light of
recollected paintings; undulating
swells reflect peeling palazzos.  So you
sigh, go limp, submerged in antiquity. 
The ebony prow skims over the canal
as decadence issues a lullaby. 
Lido or Lethe, crib or coffin, either
way you’re cradled in oblivion by
the lilt of the as-yet-unpaid tenor
at his sweep, caroling cannily.
 


​
 
Without Music Life Would Be A Mistake
(Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols)
 
and even as it is there are plenty of
wrong notes, uncalled-for cacophonies,
flat vamps, trite melodies, sharps that prick.
Woodwinds oftentimes clog with je ne
sais quoi, trombones skid, timpani can leave
one stiff, exposed.  By the second voice some
fugues crumble in divorce and chaconnes drone
into mere ennui.  Will your soundtrack
ever swell with insinuating strings, with
mammoth chorales that thunder in the gut?
 
Midway between downbeat and finale,
between two chaste silences when no false
note has been played and no blunder is to
be resolved, poor fingers may muff so many
bars the squirming audience looks in
its lap for shame.  Nietzsche went mad
despite Bizet, nor did Chopin really help; yet he
faithlessly blessed this daft hullabaloo,
felt the worst could be redeemed by this best
redress, the unearned boon of harmony.