for Johann
fr. The Music Rooms
the hours
echoing or enfolding
quietly, lighted in
children’s weather
remembering what surreal
brilliance was
gone by elsewhere
forgotten
a terminal luster
on a missed eclipse
of forecasts, unapocalyptic
As a test of secular faith
As a wire that all
is forgiven in flight
or forgotten by the promontory
of water and shadow
sometimes liquid
silhouetted swept back in
a hollow tide
(the scribbles of the dooms are
for selfcursed minds)
wouldn’t imagine
lilac would
dance out through the
breeze in quite this way.
so precisely free
or that there would be that suspension
of venal clarity that is
only told in the buried rock
I thought all
there was to do to survive was
vanquished
by the fight that made us
breathe,
and not condemned
I recall the nights’
infinite silences before the resolutions of Bach’s notes
Alternatetakes2 