This is a poem I wrote for my primary writers’ group’s monthly newsletter. It is a music-impression poem–I listen to a piece of music, and write the images it evokes in my conscious mind. I write many poems like this–they’re surreal, and seemingly nonsensical, because the images arise from my subconscious mind. This particular one, for which I used Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, will probably be published in the May newsletter–though censored. Our new president (who took office in February) insists that I remove a passage to which she objects. I have begrudgingly done so, just to get it on hard copy. However, on the Internet, I can include it. So here is the original, uncensored version, for your reading pleasure (or displeasure)!
Beethoven: Symphony No. 9
Scott ____
First Movement
Distant planets collide
Forming only a blip on S.E.T.I.’s screen
The search continues.
I WANT TO BELIEVE? No
I want to know.
From the Pacific rise islands
Called Farallon
Where great whites gulp sea lions
To scientists’ scrutiny.
Telescope-microscope–we dwell between, in
Visible space.
The slightest of swords slide
Ceremonial stars for historians’ dreams.
And because they mean movement
Jupiter cannot conceal its moons.
I ravish Katrina in a French-Quarter alley
Beneath Mars, above Venus.
Second Movement
Christmas chefs dice odds, in our view
While evens rest on rotating dishes.
Spirits dance ’round telephone poles
In summer space, amidst bats and moths.
Believe cicadas who tell of future forms
For yours might be among them.
Posthumous poet I am
If popular poet, at all.
Flagships of ancient America swirl
Circling now-extinct sharks.
Dimensions share air
Since time does not exist.
In a meadow of mischief I am conceived
Then born-sided into myself
As she drapes frilly finery on our wedding world.
Third Movement
I rest in the Myrtle Grove
Cemetery, along my post-midnight walk.
For I feel more loved by the dead
Than by the living.
I find the same concrete bench
And chant nam-myoho-renge-kyo, nam-myoho-renge-kyo, nam-myoho-renge-kyo
For Buddhists beneath wind chimes
Then repeat the 23rd Psalm, and pray the Prayer of Jesus
What the buried members of the adjoining Methodist church
Called the Lord’s Prayer.
For all faiths are sacred here.
Fourth Movement
Regal horses traversed this road
Just a dirt path, a century ago
Their riders whistling this joyous Ode to Joy.
The bass in black sings night into day
When the calls of the chorus rendezvous with his.
And the composer teases this same theme
Through the tenor
On the Walkman I wear in my shooting-house.
Then appears a buck, a spike
In the concluding crescendo of daylight.
Yet just as I aim my rifle
A four-point emerges
And I switch accordingly
And drop it with a single shot.
When the spike jerks upward
I win it, as well.
Maybe Beethoven hunted deer too!
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