Lost Poem, Found Poem
This isn’t a memory of iniquity, lost things,
people and places we love.
This isn’t a diary of our years in exile, years
without company or romance.
This isn’t a guide to fake your own heartbeat,
sometimes a screech.
This isn’t a song of an eye for an eye
or destroying angel, no child of fact alone
or shame.
* * *
This isn’t tactful or tactless
as coughing up
planets in your sleep.
This isn’t a sermon
of love or fate – life is beautiful
and full of monsters.
This isn’t about buying time,
in the monolith of the quotidian
life is suspended like your arrival in the rain.
This isn’t just melancholia – in this place
you are songwriter and mother,
not invisible.
This isn’t just an exercise in desire,
we’ve been planting this garden
for years.
This is the lexicon of our future selves,
a homecoming,
not just clothesline saga.
These are chronicles of the night garden,
the gathering place of waters
that never sleep.
They found a naked body in the fish pond,
this body does not belong to you
and that is all.
Nocturne No. 19 in E Minor Op. Posth. 72 No. 1
Music that’s alive isn’t perfect
but always a concrescere or a growing
Together – resistance
and resilience, reminding us
that all compositions are made
by those who are themselves composed.
A coalescence
of courtship and death,
demise and determination of hope –
in the love affairs
between Gymnasium, family life,
and human creation.
Even at 15, Chopin mediates
relationships between self-indulgence
and restraint, like a student
who is already
teaching. Intimacy and sorrow,
flowing over broken chords,
as if the loss of his beloved sister,
longing for home
and family anxiety, triggered the heartbreak
and mystery, that led Debussy to say,
‘with the piano alone,
he discovered everything.’
