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Musical Impressionism by Mark J. Mitchell

8/16/2016

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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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