Schubertiad
After the String Quintet in C, D956
One moment before it starts –
one breath.
Light stills
in the meadow,
stalls at oaks
and the river's silver line.
For an instant
your stomach turns over –
as if you missed yourself
and this minute
and the next
were already a memory.
*
Sometimes,
world slips from beat to beat
like a song.
The afternoon fills
with lokum's evasive scent,
deep notes of cherry,
and there are saucers of honey
and peaches and a girl
who leans on a cushion to sing –
Open your notebook,
catch
how she throws out the tune
as if she tongued
a rose
between her lips –
*
Wanderer, the wide river
shines in the morning sun.
Between the country and the city -
see it run.
You'd like to run with it
to a quiet place, in fields
time and sickness never visit
and joy shields.
Too soon the flood and battened sluice,
the detritus of a life
that's been turned adrift
on this tide
which now seems beautiful and bright:
the river's backdrop to the kiss
you borrowed from daylight
and bring to Dis.
*
Waiting (stateliest of the modes)
among Greek key, acanthus,
shuttered glass
and the light snagged in stucco –
where each façade rises
in stillness
and stone grows
infinitesimally –
you feel a creak and strain:
spring ice
yawing on its tethers.
You poor soul.
Without summer's garlands and girls
you're quite bare,
bespectacled and alone
in that soiled bed.
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