In the Belly of the Whale

By the time I’d reached my fifteenth year
I had within my cramped and tiny context geared
myself to tackle Mozart's violin concerto,
number four: I lumbered poorly through the score
at first: the prospect of uniting such a happy
burst of semiquavers with the flavors
of the maestro’s bright ebullience was quite

beyond my scope: but when you’re fourteen
you are biologically disposed to hope –
and, more important, have the muscles
and the reflexes – wed to a terrible anxiety
to please – to grow from hope a living being:
draw a pastel forest from its trees. I found a larger
place at last and populated it with Disney

prettinesses – knowing not without a little fear
that somehow, somewhere in the vast
still unexplored deep shadows of the music’s
cool and whispering surrounding woods
I’d find – when I was braver – where its dearer
goods were buried. So many years since then
have flurried; I still savor – play – some

strains of that concerto every now and then:
the notes are blurrier – more softly married:
Disney has long given way to something faintly
Kurosawan – my Mozart has a taint and taste
of Rashomon – wherein four witnesses of one
dark crime belie each other’s tales and leave
one wondering – stories within stories

that regale us with the questionable glories
of a human blundering. Ah – but – then: I think
of what those Disneynesses all entailed –
excitedly in tension with what fourteen year olds
barely sense lies dark – beyond – through many
lenses – their opaquely pretty veil: adolescence
plays its Mozart in the belly of the whale.





.