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Musical Impressionism
(after Debussy, 12 Etudes For Piano) Book One 1) For Five Fingers Call up the smoke, slowly, conjure your hidden animal soul. Quick, this is an order, not a request (quit your giggling). It's serious, we can't have this silliness, there's too much at stake. Carve the smoke quickly with your tiny hands, make shadow cutouts, now. (It's not that I don't care for you, loving only your skilled fingers, your talented skin. No, but what I need now, today, are what they promise in the dark tent of this bed, where mysteries conspire and smoke rises from an invisible fire that can't warm either of us). Do it now. 2) For the Thirds Now, as the sun fights its way out of mist, an avian concerto moves me from sleep to waking. Already she has entered the day leaving a gap in the bed, sheets still kissed by her warmth. Perhaps, I think, I'll leap out of bed, catch her on the stairs and say-- Well, what I forgot to say. My body resists the impulse, the mind calculates that it will keep. This is a squall of loss, not a storm. She's not far away. 3) For the Fourths Away from this table, this pen, words carry different weights. Silence is not decoration there. Quick waterfall notes from birds are just and only that. Things aren't taught to mean beyond themselves. But right here, at this cloth covered table, the white field of a page demands thoughts that are near reality but not themselves real. That's not at all true, of course. I've heard such theories but disagree. It's not words reflecting facts, like a mirror, just a mute language, recoverable but concealed. 4) For the Sixths Concealed under clothes her form eludes words, both truth and lies. Her hair, at times a brown storm sometimes a dark helmet. Her eyes are more daunting than her shape, to words, at least. There's a place, the nape of her neck, that I never let escape my kisses, she's so tasty there. Often, never enough, I'll just drape an arm across her shoulder, aware of her quiet heart beat, her beauty, her soul, I suppose. I want her whole. 5) For the Octaves Holes punched in silence by birds and children; a patch of mist, forgotten by the sun. There's no balance to this morning. Diffused minutes, a fractured sequence of non-events. My patience tries to mend things, but is refused. 6) For Eight Fingers Refusing a smoke for now, I squat by the fire and ask for a story. Quick, with small words, like sparks flying from these logs. You start by lying, which I enjoy. I like stories tall in the woods, crackling with fire snaps. I bask yellow in the purple night. Start again. Now. Book Two 7) For the Chromatic Scale Three blackbirds smudge the sky like dotted notes. Nearby, a red car slides past a yellow house and down a blue hill, now quick, now slow, lost at last to distance and mist. The birds bank and wheel in careless formation, silent. 8) For the Ornaments Silent smoke brushes past late blossoms, the bough still damp from last night's all too rare rain. Fire is elsewhere, smoldering leftover from the last winter feast, perhaps, or imprisoned by a presence lamp in a cold church. The blossoms remain, tossed lightly by a breeze, teased and passed by confused birds, dazzled by the damp leaves. Clouds are forming, perhaps it will rain soon, but probably not. Each drop seems like the last that will ever fall. It grows dark but I leave the lamp alone, unlighted. Silence, I think is the main requirement. It allows one to reach past this melancholy drought, to cherish the damp brown earth, and to pray for rain. 9) For Repeated Notes Rain escaped again. Birds scatter like smoke in the gray light. I'd heard some storm was due, over due. Just words from an insane weatherman. That's the third day this week he's wrong. The ground's been stirred but stays thirsty. A moon dryly wanes, interred in a sterile sky. We've lamely entered dust's reign, with these damned cheerful birds. 10) For Opposite Sonorities Birds--gaps in silence--red and blue blurs in the leaves, more active than ear or eye, a distraction from her, a difference. She (ah, that sound) in her long languors, studies in blacks and browns, the gaps in her presence. I sit here, hunched over this long table, warming my hands above coffee, birds teasing my sight, turning her over in my heart, as if she were some image of woman not a woman herself. Then suddenly in the silence between two notes, like smoke, the broken icon is gone. 11) For Compound Arpeggios Gone, the mist has vanished from the small valley of this yard. Quick quiet notes, small stones under shoes next door form a gardener's minuet. I am thinking nothing at all (though I breathe her and live her I do not, always, think her) just letting the cool day rinse me, remake me, not even keeping watch. Silent. 12) For the Accords Silence, startled to waking, to music-- No, not birds, not now, at this time, this place. It's within her, as I make an ethic of our love. Wrongly, I know, face to face with myself over these words. I replace feeling with fiction, with mirrors and smoke. I cast shadow plays on the wall, then erase them before she looks, afraid they might evoke laughter, but lust, afraid of becoming a joke at this late date. Concealed somewhere by mists and evasions, there's a strongbox of words whose meanings I've forgotten. It resists me. But if it opened, if she just heard what I meant to say, now, she would be stirred and her enthusiastic hands would fall on to my hungry skin, light as a bird's note on an ear. Enough! I become small. I've learned enough to wait, to listen for a call. Mark J. Mitchell Mark J. Mitchell studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver, George Hitchcock and Barbara Hull. His work has appeared in various periodicals over the last thirty five years, as well as the anthologies Good Poems, American Places, Hunger Enough, Retail Woes and Line Drives. It has also been nominated for both Pushcart Prizes and The Best of the Net. He is the author of two full-length collections, Lent 1999 (Leaf Garden Press) and Soren Kierkegaard Witnesses an Execution (Local Gems) as well as two chapbooks, Three Visitors (Negative Capability Press) and Artifacts and Relics, (Folded Word). His novel, Knight Prisoner, is available from Vagabondage Press and two more novels are forthcoming: A Book of Lost Songs (Wild Child Publishing) and The Magic War (Loose Leaves). He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the documentarian and filmmaker Joan Juster where he makes a living showing people pretty things in his city.
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November 2023
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