Oh! – Another Oh!

A damp and heavy blanket wants to drag the city down:
humidity’s a clown that doesn’t know the circus left –
but oh, the light’s a magical and ghostly yellow-gray –
still lit with day, though rays of it perform obliquely through
the angles five o’clock decrees: I’ve drunk its obdurately
summer funk down to the lees, and this, and Beethoven,
now have me on my knees: I’m fresh, or rather wrung,

from playing violin in his quartet: an Opus 59, the one
that’s numbered 3 – second movement – dedicated
to the Russian Razumovsky – evidently predicated
on the premise that you’ll have the stomach to receive its
harrowingly delicate and graceful mystery – magical
and ghostly yellow-gray – just like today – and so I sat
there, in an upper-west-side academic’s barely fan-cooled

large apartment, middle-aged and sweating, violin
uncomfortably wedged beneath my chin, and oh, the sins
that I committed in my sad vast imperfections – oh –
another oh! – this time, of baffled and exasperated
exaltation that it’s taken fifty-seven fucking years to grow up
just enough to have become this helplessly receptive
to its gold. I guess there are advantages to growing old.


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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tTmC8UfSFQ

(NOT me playing violin :-)


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