pasted across Mozart's profile
this is no metaphor, I plucked
this chocolate from the plastic pail
at the grocery checkout stand
"Mozart Herz'l" from the Austrian cafe
on the way to your D.C. newsroom
before we knew your dad had cancer
I carefree under the Calder mobiles,
meeting you underground for tea.
----
Mozart's measured sweetness
survives the oboeist's combover. In our era
I listen on YouTube, my heart open, avid.
Too many needles in the internet haystack
and Google finds them. I needn't go a mile.
Bach's passion on foot across Germany
to hear an organ. I can hear eleven
any hour.
---
Humane Impulse of the Lyric
After Hearing Ed Hirsch at Intiman Theater
He wanted to write an American poetry
intellectually robust but with heart. Modernists
were cold and their fascistic tendencies, Elliot,
Pound, not unrelated. Poetry precedes prose
and there is poetry in every culture - he doesn't
want ours to be the one to drop the ball.
The tendencies of poetry are two: elegy and
celebration. Time for more celebration. At his age
he says it too has darkness, not a poetry for the young.
"Give me back my father," he began, emotional
high C, embracing Tsvetaeva's short poem power.
He warmed with help from Mandelstam,
Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Adam Zagajewski.
Poetry is social, he said, conjured more poets -
Paul Celan to say poems are messages in bottles -
the poet sends one out, you find it, it is yours.
Ninito Neruda glimpsing another child's hand
through a fence hole, exchanging wheeled sheep
for his treasured resinous cone - gift for gift,
writing and reading, humane impulse of the lyric.
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