October 23-29, 2017: Poetry from R.J. Zeman and Geoffrey Heptonstall

Dust

We made love
in her
tiny bedroom
at 2 a.m.
while drunk
on whiskey.
The floor
was covered
in women’s magazines;
the bed
smelled like
cheap perfume.
The lights were out
and a radio
blared
in the background.
It felt
so primal
and alive.
Our bodies
pressed against each other,
covered
in sweat.
We were both
in college then;
we didn’t know
how cruel
life could get.
But even then,
in the darkness,
with a street light
illuminating
her flesh,
I thought:
yes, this is life,
this is how things work,
and soon
this will come to pass,
like everything else,
into
the dust.

Gulf of Mexico

I walk down
to a pier
at midnight
and watch
The Gulf of Mexico
lap
against the shore.
We used to
sit here
some nights:
we’d laugh
and hold hands.
I still remember
the way
your face looked
under the pale light
of the moon.
Things seemed
so alive then,
like a never ending stream
of good fortune.
I stand up,
scratch my belly,
and put my
cigarette out
under my shoe.
I go home,
through the front door,
then out
the back.
I sit in the solitude
of my backyard
with nothing
but the trees,
nothing but the wind;
nothing but the slow
rise and fall
of my breath.

Shostakovich

And another time a hesitation
when someone powerful is watching
the conductor’s wrinkled hands.
The viola’s strain is a proud man’s anguish.
Outside his apartment an artist is taken.
Images vanish from the poet’s mind.
Crowds gather for news of their leader,
a train passing slowly through his sleep.
 
Later there will be certainties.
Something may return
in the changing rooms of memory.
The composer discovers harmonies
he knows shall be forbidden.
The flesh and bone of him feel lighter
with the absence of want before
all the meanings of a single movement
 
To listen
until his music is a river
flowing between many cities,
and into the wastes
where truth must counsel caution
at noon and midnight