BRAHMS, STRING QUARTET N0.1 in c, Op.51
What could I have expected?
The glass was empty, the waiter
who seemed so friendly before
was nowhere to be found. Look at me,
somebody, I am here. The chairs
do their slow acrobatics, legs in the air
on tabletops and I still haven’t paid
my bill, doesn’t anybody care?
Here I am fat as a cello, loud as one too,
loving people right and left.
It is said that the dead take a long
time to recognize their new condition.
Is that where we are now?
The music is so alive,
all the listeners are dead. At the end
the canals will stretch out in the cold,
we will be born again
We float along so close I can
reach out and stroke the sunrise
and follow with my fingertips
the coursework of the brick.
And then the wall will end
and the canal debouch into the dark sea
which for all its marriages never
learns to speak one human language
not even this.
When boys were named Lester
and girls were called Kate
I set out walking on my big fat feet
in too-tight old brown shoes and wanderlust
and all I thought I was on my way to find
was a nice red leather armchair
by a fireplace and a cat asleep in my lap
that sometimes became a girl named Kate
who’d look away from the interesting flames
and kiss me
saying Lester, honey, read me from that book
and lo and behold the book was open on my lap
and words appeared that I could read out loud
and as long as I read new words kept appearing
and Kate would love me and listen and fall asleep
all book and cat and woman so I’d sleep too
and leave behind for a while my famous aching.
Robert Kelly
Posted over on Charlotte Mandell
from MAY DAY: Poems 2003-2005
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