Music Student, First Violinist

(in the Dvořák D Minor Symphony)

Anton, all the black notes of your symphony

Have swarmed into this girl's allegro hair.

Only the sluggard 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

Ten thousand 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 sense the recent crisis – she attacked

Lacklustre strands with demons in her hands.

All was 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 the major key

Have swarmed into this girl's adagio hair.

D. M. THOMAS

Sycamore

The sycamore stumps survived the deadliest gales

To put out new growth, leaves sticky with honeydew

And just enough white wood to make a violin.