Day 10 but poem written on Day 11

this is, i suppose, day 10 but really day 11 but poets don't care about chronological time 

anyway.  but i'm not a poet so i suppose i have no excuse.  

the elegy continues -- sort of, I guess,  Faust the fucker is everywhere. 

Anton Webern probably because of my

murdered Austrian Grandfather

"Doomed to a total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference

he inexorably kept cutting out his dazzling diamonds, the mines 

of which he had such a perfect knowledge."  

Stravinsky

It happens like this

-- what do I know about the twelve tone technique?

I quit piano

at 13.  

Long before my teacher

allowed me the honor of Schoenberg. 

Goethe's Faust

I put it down -- remember?  We went 

to find Robinson and that piano;

those red socks and the cat called Lonesome,

curled and sleeping through the endless ringing phone.

A small beat up book of immortal poems

Hart Crane, page 267 

"For the marriage of Helen and Faustus" 

and this isn't meant to be didactic 

put it down.

"A Little History of Modern Music" 

by William H. Gass -- last in the book

bought for 25 cents at the Hospital Thrift 

Shop on a steel rain Holy Saturday.  

I thought 

about the women who guarded

Christ's tomb, about Jesus' decent to Hell

and Gilgamesh.  I tried for something 

else -- Cochise, Arizona, a ghost town 

Doc Holliday and Big Nose Kate 

hot desert, prostitutes 

killing a copperhead in a far off canyon--

but even notes are not random 

-- each one like a star thrown from a fist

to form a constellation

then 

you clear your throat very close to my ear.