You ask me why:
why would I break the line here
or there?
It appears an arbitrary, random, capricious decision
with no apparent motive, other than to confuse you.
and sometimes even the punctuation
or the capital letters
(signposts of sanity, of prose, of explication with verb following noun in proper rows)
vanish
or scatter haphazard
marbles rolling across the white floor
. . .
And all those images, crushing, crowding upon each other,
full of adjective, shining with simile like pie engulfed by ice cream
then shattering into shards
glass edges razor sharp
juxtaposed and puzzling, they lead you on only to stop at a wall
and burrow under, or melt away, or step through an invisible door
through which you can't follow.
Why?
What for?
What could it mean?
The words fall out of me, pennies from an unmended pocket.
They bounce and jingle, clattering, on the paper
throw themselves before me in glowing pixels on my computer screen
begging to be heard, longing to be spoken,
demanding to be written.
Their sense, their sound, the feel of marrying thought to syllable
goads me into sitting with the clock smiling 1:00 AM
and my fingers still moving, brain soggy, netting the elusive butterfly of a participle.
They fall past you, my words, they pelt you like cold hail.
Yet you, who prefer the sense in a scientific journal,
you tilt your head at the sound of an orchestra in a television jingle
lift your chin, look away from me,
raise your hand to my mouth or shoulder in a gesture: "hush!"
Melody entangles you.
Rhythm seduces you.
The swell of a chord can make you smile.
I ask you why
a concerto has a crescendo
or a sonata a phrase.
Who makes the staccato start here, or there?
Why scatter notes among the woodwinds like crumbs to grateful birds
then hand full chords, heavy and proud, to haughty violins?
Is there a purpose to the melody winding upward, finding its way among thirds,
then drifting, descending, now leaping in a waterfall of sixteenth notes, downward again?
Why change meter once, twice, again, from 5/8 to 4/4 to 3/4
lurching and jerking, then dancing forward?
When do you take a breath?
Why is there sometimes
only silence?
I know the answers.
I know you already live in my country, the land of song
but the gods have filled your mouth with only melody for your language
and left me to follow with my syllables.
My words strangle the song back into black and white,
bend it down to the flat paper where it once took shape in arching phrase lines,
black ovals growing on the staffs like heavy-headed blossoms;
my words fracture the music into spindling letters, shapes that only signify the word
that signifies the thought
removed so far from its source that I can hope only by diversion
by the line stops that make your eye stop
I may tempt some meaning back.
We survey each other
over the chasm of words, of sound.
Are we so different, or so alike?
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each...
Do your mermaids understand mine?
Then our music rages around both of us
or softly takes one, then the other, by the hand
leading us to a garden where the flowers nod in technicolor reds and blinding yellows
and we can dance.
March 17, 1996