Coming Late to Rachmaninov

Sergei, I’m forty-three and I’ve learned to love.

It's middle age, I know.

When we recognize the power we never had

– a post-Romantic flurry of notes and emotion –

is declining. And so I’m driving

past the K-mart, the older part of the new

strip development, Sergei, some holiday

or other, lights screaming in a sky,

pennants at a car lot calling,

and the balding salesmen smile.

‘To hell with them,’ you once said, ‘I don't know how

to write a symphony.’

But I put on my Toyota's warning flashers,

pull to the curb to cry

at the adagio of your Second try.

Among the wrappers and crap from convenience stores,

shards of broken glass like clarinets,

is that theme we scoffed at younger,

da da da DEE da dum,

the styrofoam cups outlasting even the strings,

and nothing changes by your music

except that I am changed.

I walk to the median listening, the traffic passing

while the violins climb your dominant chord

to its beautiful resolution.

You of the passionless melancholy

who thought himself ‘a most uninteresting man,’

who wept a little daily, a black well.

RICHARD TERRILL

Rachmaninov

Rachmaninov put his hands terribly to his head

As he found his own First Symphony

Insupportable

And at the end of the first movement

Fled,

Spent the night on a tramcar

Shuttling backwards and forwards.

It was so garish

That his mind broke down.

But it is well known

How he was hypnotised

And returned in triumph

To compose the Second Concerto.

Now I’m Rachmaninov:

Have seen all that dazzle-in-the-dark

And dark-in-the-dazzle,

Have shuttled with wrecked mind between termini,

Recovered in the sternness

Of an obdurate Russian gaze,

Rediscovered winning musical ways.

Shrunk in my furs I menace

With whistling digits

Auditoria rapturously silent

In the spirit of polite adulterous tearooms.