for an actress i miss on wednesday nights

...play on.
          --Twelfth Night, Act 1, scene 1, 1


you,
sleeping here after the night becomes drunk
on rhapsodies wrung from tuneless keys,
on improvisations conjured up from cello strings, 
the richest kinds of wordless songs--


you,
breathing a soft berceuse,
warming my right side,
sleeping late under my lullabied blankets
while morning hangs over itself,
quiet and thin--


tomorrow, i will walk down stairs and find limp blooms bending in a crystal vase


i will reel at that absent space 
where you would have been
had other musics and other nights not called

Rachmaninov: Prelude in D Flat Major, Op. 32, No. 13

Rachmaninov: Etude-Tableau in C Minor, Op. 33, No. 3

Beethoven: Sonata in A Flat Major, Op. 110, Mvt. I

Bach: Prelude and Fugue, BWV 868

ephemeron

you enter a small, locked room. there are no windows and

the air lacks imagination.  you place scores--bach, beethoven, rachmaninov--

on the music stand and sit carefully upon the black leather bench 

(an artist's bench).

                      artist:  seek their inspirations--bach, beethoven, rachmaninov--

in this uninspiring room.  your work is placing your fingers upon the keys

day after day after day:

excite the current

wash and wring the unimaginative air within the whorl of your ear

(frustrate your already frustated mind, gauging weight and pacing lines),

work for weeks to sift through the alluvium of sound

and pan for sparkling, golden tones.

in the end, present the glorious work, but realize this:

only the clearest-eared will hear and shrewdly explain while the hungry rest

make you a god-for-five-minutes and clamor maddeningly to bask and congratulate.  

bear the moment while you can and then return to a small, locked, windowless room.  your

work is placing your fingers upon the keys day after day after day.

it will be cold there, too separate from whatever sun warms the world outside

that heavy, lonely door.