Sextets

How to put words on the glories of their ardor –
the disciplined romance of Brahms’ sextets?:
their confluence of passion, and respect for form –
one sometimes longs for that idealized experience
the Nineteenth Century, as it progressed, so
wished were true: vast ordered view, as of Hyperion,

which might unleash itself from myth and vaunt
into the exigencies and behaviors of the heart
and body – bring the sun into the unimaginable dark,
but decorously: feckless me! – the wreckage
I have wrought through sex: the shoddy mucking up,
inane perplexities, the vexing hexes that beleaguer

still – I saw a man today with whom I used to –
as we then were wont to put it – “play”:
and climbed the hill again to memories which chopped
and stung like toxic breezes through this gloriously
blue and tender August Wednesday: yes, I know
one’s living poem goes without a stop from bottom

all the way to top and out across flat beaches
to the endless reaches of the sea: it only ceases
with the dead-end of mortality – but one produces,
on the way, illusions of capitulating when
one finishes a sentence, eats a dinner, goes to sleep,
or falls in love: drugged hugs – disinhibitions

in one’s disappearing youth, and one will chug
whatever serum blocks the truth and makes
the damned excursion seem to trickle off into
a tolerable stasis wherein nothing ends and nothing
recommences. Strange, although the motive’s fear,
we find we yearn for here exactly what the Universe

would have us learn: the disciplined romance – as of
a Brahms’ sextet – the glories of its ardor, and its glows:
and how despite one’s fuck-ups and one’s dreadful lows,
the thing just flows and flows and flows – until,
of course, it doesn’t. The air, today, is blindingly,
alluringly lubricious. I almost wish it wasn’t.


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