v2:
Mozart In The Fall
I’m 10 again, kicking the leaves.
“Wake up! Don’t lie there!”
Unlike these leaves Mozart’s music
is always alive to me.
Whenever I choose I can recall
Divertimento in D playing,
as lively as a bachelor party.
My heart for the moment
is as light as a soap bubble.
I recall my bachelor party,
my father, a divorce attorney,
for once mercifully
not offering advice.
The sadness and happiness
of that night…wasn’t I
just raising toasts yesterday?
How quickly youth passes!
Like Mozart’s grave
it’s nowhere to be found,
and yet his music
is everywhere around me,
the past and present a hybrid,
inseparable, mixing together
in different ways
moment by moment,
like light and water.
As a kid I liked to stuff leaves
into my pockets.
What the heck. I do it again
feeling wistful, perhaps.
As I enter the front door,
taking off my coat,
my wife meets me with news
of a failing neighbor.
Going through my pockets
she wonders, “Why
are leaves here?” I shrug.
What can I say? It's a reminder
to enjoy this life
as much as if it were one
of Mozart’s divertimentos
—before I too join the fallen.
v1:
Mozart In The Fall
I’m 10 again, kicking the leaves.
“Wake up! Don’t lie there!”
But they do. So I jump
into their crunchy, brown pile
once more, as if it were a puddle
that Gene Kelly would love.
Like Mozart, he is dead.
Isn’t that what leaves
remind us of, the dead,
of our own mortality?
Though I kick the leaves,
they won’t fly off like wrens in a gust.
Yet Mozart’s music
is a lively chamber orchestra
forever celebrating his joy
in the background.
Whenever I choose I can recall
Divertimento in D playing,
as lively as a bachelor party.
My heart for the moment
is as light as a soap bubble.
I recall my bachelor party,
my father, a divorce attorney,
for once mercifully
not offering advice.
The sadness and happiness
of that night…wasn’t I
just raising toasts yesterday?
How quickly youth passes!
Like Mozart’s grave
it’s nowhere to be found,
and yet his music
is everywhere around me,
the past and present a hybrid,
inseparable, mixing together
in different ways
moment by moment,
like light and water.
As a kid I liked to stuff leaves
into my pockets.
What the heck. I do it again
feeling wistful, perhaps.
Heading home I run into a friend
who tells me of a colleague
who’s hanged himself.
As I enter the front door,
taking off my coat,
my wife meets me with news
of a failing neighbor.
Going through my pockets
she wonders, “Why
are leaves here?” I shrug.
What can I say? It's a reminder
to enjoy this life
as much as if it were one
of Mozart’s divertimentos
—before I too join the fallen.
Mozart In The Fall
Re: Mozart In The Fall
Yes, I like the revision. You've cut the parts that needed to go, that slowed down the poem and were extraneous. I wanted to know something more about the father and why he was there.
-
- Posts: 2683
- Joined: 03 Jun 2016, 21:03
Re: Mozart In The Fall
I wanted to work in something re the narrator's aging, being part of the process that all life goes through, and the father reference kinda references that. Don't know if it's distracting...