Sound Mind

The more I live the life of music the more I am convinced that it is the freely imaginative mind that is at the core of all vital music making…An imaginative mind is essential to the creation of art in any medium, but it is even more essential in music precisely because it is the freest, the most abstract, the least fettered of all the arts.  --Aaron Copland

Sometimes,

when my brain is littered
     with pieces of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier,
     heaps of String Quartets,
Shostakovich Symphonies, Rachmaninov Etudes
and Requiems;

when my mind begins
to lounge amidst
     the supple sexiness of Melody Gardot's ballads and songs--
          the verve with which
          The Paris Combo spins a joking scale--
the poignant throb inside
an Orpheus and Euridice--
      it's all I can do to remain
           sanely, confidently
                                   connected to the balance of a world outside myself.
So much sound sings and I am possessed.

Inexplicably, I turn
inward
     and listen,
beguiled by the musics of other men.

It is an ecstasy,
becoming lost and not lost among
the antecedents and their consequents
     (these: the questions worked out and answered by Chopin and Chicago and Sinatra),
 and I find peace.

But I am afraid, too,
when my sound mind is seduced--
I remember Beethoven
muttering and humming his symphonies to himself, hair-wild and stammering on a street.

outside
     apart
          alone

An apostle or an amusement:
     a crazy man people quickly pass.