Almost Unnoticed

We Write Poems’ Prompt #78 is about Halloween! I’ve always been a chicken, exaggeratedly so, especially after watching scary movies and regretting having watched them 😦

Almost Unnoticed

The ghost in my house
is an opener of windows
and a closer of doors.

My memory doesn’t quite serve me right
as the hallway door remains just ajar
in the dark morning,

or as I watch the bathroom door
close again past the fogged pane
of the shower

as if someone had just slipped in.
I listen for sighs of hinges as I sleep,
my ticking brain keeps vigil

even in daylight,
I throw open the curtains
and turn on all the lights

observe shadows to make sure
they stay in place and
don’t glide in ways

that make them even more unlike us.

Opus 118 No. 2

The Poets and Writers Prompt #77 asked us to write about something that takes place in an instant. I decided to write about an instant in music — one of the biggest challenges I think. I included a YouTube video of the piece that inspired the poem, one of my favorites of all time. Evgeny Kissin’s version is by far the best, but piece number 2 starts at minute 2:00.  Here goes:

Opus 118 No. 2

Saturday morning
at the practice hall,
second floor:
a fading gingko tree
waves slightly from the wide,
clean window
and early light
warms the mud-colored carpet,
attentive to a Brahms intermezzo
one he dedicated to an ailing
Clara Schumann, another composer’s wife.
The event of two chords
comes easy like a wind that
pauses before a dark
landscape, its colors
too tired, too fragile
to distinguish themselves,
hues of bruised fruit,
skin, things seen at dusk,
two chords like settling
in a soundless depth with a voice
calling from outside
the dreamt place
heartbreak laid out
on a shore one cannot re-encounter
in that light
under those glad, warm shadows.
A bird flits from the tree,
someone has descended the last stair.
I see my desire in the window,
rising from the instrument,
bringing it closer to breathing,
sleeping.
I want to rock my insecurities to sleep –
Harmony, a submerged garden.

A Different Kind of Light

 

The Poets and Writers prompt for this week suggested using these words as part of a poem: promenade, mettle, flap, arbor, azimuth, heap, mast, foxgrape

I hardly knew what half of those words meant. But looking them up led me to some other memories from my college days. And it ended up not being a poem. 

During a winter in New York we gathered at dusk in an old building, high up on the 8th or 9th floor, to observe the stars. Science-illiterate, humanities majors stuck in astronomy lab, taking turns to try and make out amidst the night sky, which was never completely dark in that city, all the famed constellations and stars we knew the names of but were never able to see.

On the roof, it was cold as we nursed the telescope. We never understood the lesson but we were always eager to watch. The city lights, the lights of the university and the campus promenade, spread out under us, the fervor of those streets attempting to reach up into the darkness where we stood rubbing our hands together and peering upwards.

Azimuth is a word I’m sure we encountered, with our graphs and measuring tools. Formulas I would learn and forget in a day’s time, heaps of numbers I couldn’t interpret. Azimuth. Arabic for “direction,” like rediscovering an old lullaby drowned in the passing of time, or a name hidden in the flap of a book. Like the name of the girl who sat beside me at the long wooden table, with the long black hair  and whose nails were the color of foxgrapes. I looked at her fingers and decided she played the violin. She came in one evening carrying the black case of that instrument. That evening we measured the distance between each others’ eyes, but I don’t remember anymore what the experiment was.

“High mass stars are like the hare, they burn out quickly. Low mass stars are like the tortoise: slow, steady winners of the race.” 

We lent to astronomy our indifference, and went off to study Shakespeare or win debates. We had no mettle for the significance of things outside of where we were grounded, rooted in an arbor of old dead authors; we went to find illumination in texts and old books in the dusty stacks of the secret alcoves of the library. Like navigators at sea without a mast, tossed out to find different shores. Explaining the universe’s rules the only way we knew how, with fables and metaphors.