MOTIONLESS
I could not move
but was disappearing
by Henze’s romantic
“Elegy for Young Lovers”
with Auden and Kallman’s
libretto on my memory’s bed,
it happened before
I was in the same position
at his Ninth Symphony
when German history’s
voices of the dead rise
at pre war’s deaf madness
in Henze’s composition
leaving me stunned,
yes, it happened
years before to me
with Armstrong and Davis
at Newport,
or hearing jazz phrases
in Messiaen or Ellington,
or listening to
the free atonal Klavierstück
from Schoenberg,
awestruck at an early time
when poetry and music
from random combinations
inspired the underside
of modern posterity
in a motionless tune up
on a high- riser of melody.