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Nina Corwin Page 2
On Listening to the Brahms Violin Sonata
#1
And just like that! Cruising up Route 94
with the classical radio station
crooning
on all four speakers, when it gets to
the moment of that certain crescendo
where
the violin does what violins do so well,
and the bow catches the sinews inside
my chest as if they were strings
stretched across an unfretted
fingerboard, it strikes
me that perhaps when Brahms composed he
chose his instruments the way a painter
chooses colors, dabbing his brush in a
grace note of magenta because the violin
can
shimmy up a string so sweet, maybe
turning it over in his hands as he
imagines the
sound of magenta rubbing up against the
chords of a deep forest green, the way a
poet
might choose a word, say, magenta
because the sound curves against the
roof of the mouth,
or the way a word like piano makes a
kind of corkscrew between the cheeks,
how clutter
clicks, and chandelier is fragile and
elegant at the same time, or how a chef
picks a leaf
of cilantro for its clean line and
timbre where taste meets texture curried
up against a
cardamon pod, the contrapuntal harmonies
when they echo with magenta or piano,
the chords they make together in a
sentence or crooning on a car radio –
and it couldn’t
be flute or oboe, not here, this moment
– but now, these cadenzas, this final G
major,
now: the violin.
But Silently
“Is this what you mean us to think, does
this
explain the silence of the morning...?”
– Louise Gluck
The ocean waves won’t tell.
Likewise, the trees don’t speak our
language.
They just rustle softly in the night.
And so we turn to you,
Oh, Great Celestial Psychoanalyst
hoping you’ll put it all together:
A plus B equals C, something more
conclusive
than “I think, therefore I am.”
But silently, just out of view,
from behind the fainting couch
peeking out of bushes, allegedly
from deserts or mountaintops
too craggy to access
your occasional grunts and inscrutable
nods
are infinitely open to interpretation.
Looking skyward we lie, couch-bound,
and wait for answers.
Absent that, we project our own:
You are the scowling father, punishing
father, the loving father we never had.
So we spill out our fears and
transferential
longings, our most
precious resentments, serve up our sins
in a great buffet of contrition
waiting for your pronouncement.
For you to say
something – anything. To make sense
of this earthly mess.
(C) 2011 CW Books, Cincinnati,Ohio. |