The next, a much more decent poem, is also about a woman.
I was listening to a student orchestra
once playing a symphony of Dvorak, the D minor symphony,
and I was enraptured, less by the music
than by the long hair of the student first violinist who
was sitting just in front of me and slightly
above me in the canvas chair, and the long hair
was streaming down and sort of trapped by the canvas.
I found myself in the symphony all the time
having to jerk my mind and my emotions
back from this beautiful hair-- black hair-- to the symphony.
And afterwards, I tried to write about this,
trying to relate the life in this hair,
to the art which I had half heard.
I've called this poem "Music Student First Violinist."
Anton, the name of course is the Christian name of Dvorak.
"Anton, all the black notes of your symphony
have swarmed into this girl's allegro hair.
Only the sluggered breves and minims
stay trapped by the bars of the conductor's score.
Pours frozen from her crown's simple motif, a black cascade
of glistening counterpoint to where my gladly martyred eyes
receive 10,000 quavers' barbed and startling points, where
the taut canvas chairback lets it go.
So near, I could imprison with my hand
the tempting weight of that polyphony,
tug her bent head back from the weaving bow.
There is a melody in each separate strand,
had I a chance to study its great score;
your temporal genius rendered spatially.
It is too short, this timeless hour.
The time to plumb its currents, ponder how it weaves from
the home minor to a major key and brings it back,
find if it joys or grieves in its own ponderings of its own
shut score, cannot be measured by the metronome, or clock,
or pulse, or carbon in the rocks.
I catch its shampoo's faintly lurking theme
and since the recent crisis--
she attacked lacklustre strands with demons in her hands.
All with dismay-- will it be right in time?
She hacked its knots before the fire.
Tonight the whole performance is in place, exact;
blue-hazed with static electricity.
Her soul's in music, music in her hair.
Symphony of her darkest attribute.
She'll wrap it in a scarf, and disappear.
A tube will hold her and her buried stream.
Since art is less than life, agree
that I do right, amidst the coughs,
to hear no music but its waist-long cataract.
She will express you just as passionately
when all the white notes of your symphony,
unlike the black notes dead within the score,
in the rich coda of a major key have swarmed
into this girl's adagio hair.