Clintonium!

NaPoWriMo Day 29: Modest Mussorgsky, in the Hospital

April 29th, 2010 - Comments (4)

“Life, wherever it reveals itself; truth, no matter how bitter… these are what I want, this is where I am afraid of missing the mark.” – From a letter to Vladimir Stasov

I’ve worked and I’ve watered that musical spark
(at times I have watered too well…),

I’ve hungered for poison, alone in the dark
and burned in a sobering hell,

I’ve seen the fruition of all that I feared,
lost even a servant post’s wage,

I’ve sopped up sonatas like soup from my beard
and bellowed with orchestral rage,

Yet always I’ve thirsted for life in my art,
for something to buoy me up,

I’ve poured out the notes of a desperate heart
but settled for death in a cup.

Posted at 3:40 pm in Poetry - Comments (4)

NaPoWriMo Day 28: The Researcher

April 28th, 2010 - Comments (1)

He spends long evenings poring over brittle yellowed photographs
in libraries and private archives. Sometimes sifting quickly through stacks,
sometimes squinting close into his magnifying glass
at the faces. Hundreds and thousands of faces
captured via light and lens, silver halide salts and stop bath.
He searches, endlessly for another glimpse, and occasionally gasps
with recognition: Here he is again!
Yes, that same long nose and the high cheekbones. The serious mouth
and determined set of the jaw. Those hollow, tired eyes,
set in the smooth face that never ages.
Sometimes the man is sharply focused and clearly the subject. Sometimes blurred,
or grainy, or over/under exposed, crowded by other faces
or nearly lost in the background, perhaps recorded accidentally.
Sometimes he is mustachioed, or wearing a hat,
seen in profile, or with his hair parted on the opposite side.
But it is the same face. Doubtlessly the same.
He is there: at a peace rally, wearing bell bottom jeans and bushy sideburns;
in a lab coat, with thick-framed black glasses and a narrow tie;
with a woman in a poodle skirt (she is smiling);
in formation with the 3rd battalion of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment;
standing in a bread line, bowl in hand;
eating peanuts at a baseball game;
pulling a sign away from a suffragette;
sitting behind the wheel of a model T;
on the deck of a steamer, in white waistcoat and hornburg;
listening to a record on a phonograph;
handing a message to Brigadier General Ripley at Antietam;
stepping out of a horse-drawn carriage;
and even further back, in daguerreotypes on copper plates.
It is the same face. The same man. Not a father, brother, or son.
Not an uncanny resemblance passed down a family line
through the dominant resurfacing of a genetic pattern. No.
These would exhibit some variance, however slight, in the shapes
and measured placements of features.
This face is the same. Impossibly the same.

And it is his own.

Posted at 9:52 pm in Poetry - Comments (1)