Night in C Minor

Rachmaninoff’s C minor is the key
to prod the kinds of seizure, grieving
and renunciation that you hadn’t known
you’d needed, but you do: the leisure
to renounce and seize and grieve
throughout its reddish-purple light:
the Russian amplitude of sorrow

and desire you require – now – tonight.
Rachmaninoff would have you tumble
down and off his fat arpeggiated
C’s until you landed in his secret
cavern – pillowed there, protected:
source of all rubato and vibrato: welling
up and trembling in the heart whence

everything you’ll ever know has come
and comes – will come. You feel its fat
flow through your fingers to your violin –
and hear the saddest cascade of
accompanying observation – piano
somewhere, oddly, outside and within –
some distant dim resistance tells you

this is arrant bathos; no – you’re
somewhere harder, deeper, firmer: far
behind the scrim and miles down,
and it’s real pathos – actual and dying,
breathing and expiring, no assessment
matters anymore. You prod – must
prod – amorphous and unfocussed

sense and jabber with whatever simulacra
you can conjure up as God: and this,
tonight, is it, this fit – this second of
the maestro’s mournful irrepressible
concerti – sable fur of sentience which,
tonight, expresses now, forever what and
who you are – starkly and exactly right.


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