This book contains so many good poems I almost couldn't choose one.
Scales
Maybe it is the pull
of the violin
like the ocean itself
drawing us to its side,
the sad memory
of something lost
and irretrievable
but worthy of the search.
Skirting the dunes
this morning, the ocean
just a sound drifting over
from the other side,
your melody returned
to me unwarranted.
How could you
have known, Samuel Barber,
that your violin concerto
could tell such a story?
But the story is such
a common one, I suppose.
What begins as love
disintegrates after betrayal,
transforms after grief
into something like the end.
Can you tell me, forgotten Master,
great sandpiper scavenging
the shifting shoreline,
why your concerto, abstract
as only Music can be,
should time and time again
offer such minor tragedy?
Samuel Barber, whose concerto
was first deemed impossible,
you wrongly taught us that virtuosity
was something attainable, something
only slightly out of reach.
Send me a sign, old man.
Teach me how to stop playing
these scales of loss.
The Second Person: Poems (Stahlecker Series Selection)
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