Daylight Sonata

It's a peaceful morning here in Brooklyn. If you've ever looked
into the vivid blue eyes of a Himalayan cat, then may be able
to understand the vividness of today's sky.

I'm listening to Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata." Relentlessly.
There are certain sounds that my ears fall in love with for a time
and I indulge my ears the way I indulge everything else: esp.
my tastebuds, esp. my sexual appetite.

Have you ever put a song on repeat for hours? It's time's
best magic trick, the simplest, most ingenious mind fuck:
every five minutes or so becomes a mirror of itself.
Time only passes for the duration of the song, and then it loops
back in on itself like a rottweiler chasing it's own phantom tail.
When I listen to a song I love, over, over, time doens't pass.
That tiny smile that always blooms out of my favorite moment
of the song, that milisecond where i prolong a blink
(i do that only for unbearably beautiful things),
these tiny gestures reincarnate themselves again, again.

And then the phone rings. Then my time is up. I have to go to
work. I have to jump in the shower. My stomach is growling
like an angry dog tied to a pole. But I emerge knowning
that I needed to hear that sound for as long as I did. It may
have been two lifetimes. It may have been 10 minutes.
But, I needed to hear it the way I sometimes need
to feel my lovers arm sling unconsciously around my sleeping
waist in the morning, in the viscious night. It's that illusion
that something, someone on this planet was made so many
years ago, just for you, just for this moment of sweet collision.

I didnt' wake up this morning needing to feel my lover's
arm, but I did wake up needing to hear Beethoven's
"Moonlight Sonata." I don't know much Italian, but I do
know that sonata means little song. I only know that
because that's where the word sonnet comes from.
Who ever said a masters degree in poetry is useless?

I woke up this morning needing to hear it. Beethoven.
What I love about music: how it's crafted around silence.
Without the skillful use of silence, music would make no sense.
Stars would make no sense without the black in between
them. Stars would make no sense without eachother.
It's the same thing with architecture: how it's crafted
around pure space. Without that recognition of space,
you'll have nothing useful.

That's how poetry and art in general is a commentary
on the vast silences of our lives: inner and external.
It burrows like a mole into the uninhabitable spaces within
us where words have no business being: the swamps, the skies
the fires, and all that unfathomable water.

That's what makes art such an intrinsically arrogant thing.
This is why we have no choice but to love it. Stretch it.
It strives to speak not only the unspoken, but the unspeakable.
Like my lover's unconscious arm, like "Moonlight Sonata" composed
hundreds of years ago entirely for me, this morning--is art
this world's greatest illusion? Are we all Houdinis--master
illusionists? What if we're greater than Houdini--illusionists
even to ourselves? Houdini knew he was creating illusion---do we?
Can art truly encompass even one synapse in our brains,
one breath of our inner lives?

Enough. I've written a poem lately, one I've been writing for years
it seems. But I can't even remember the poem I've written before
that and I can't imagine what I'll write after this one. I'm not saying
it's a tour-de-force but it just took so much out of me. When did i stop
being a bending branch? When since could one poem break me so
easily?

I just need to know why it is that my writing is coming along
so slowly lately. Yes, I'm busy but busy has and never will be an excuse.
I've always found time to write; i've never had a problem sliding
a hot something to the back burner to write a poem because there are
few things more important than a poem that's ready.

So much is happening in the world yet so slowly the words come,
more ooze than gush, more moan than orgasm,
as my friend Kevin would say, more corset than garter belt.

I guess i made a decision: that if i'm coming to the page lightly,
then I may as well not come at all. I want my words
to go places in me and come back with clues. If something
has no clue then why make it immortal?

"Moonlight Sonata" has just started again and it's time for me to
wrench myself away from it and from this day encased in the picture
frame of my window. Time to walk away from this music and walk
into this day, to make it larger than it already is. As I walk
to the train, then to work, I know I will look up into the vivid sky
and think that maybe all of this is what lies beyond the Himalayan's
blue gaze, maybe this is what lives inside that cat, an entire city,
these buildings, these yellow cars armed with receipt paper, and me,
big haired woman with the ghost of a flu, walking down a street
in East Harlem.