Mozart In The Fall

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BobBradshaw
Posts: 2683
Joined: 03 Jun 2016, 21:03

Mozart In The Fall

#1 Post by BobBradshaw » 09 Dec 2022, 21:22

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.

BobBradshaw
Posts: 2683
Joined: 03 Jun 2016, 21:03

Re: Mozart In The Fall

#2 Post by BobBradshaw » 14 Dec 2022, 21:53

Revised...see v2

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Billy
Posts: 1384
Joined: 22 Jun 2006, 10:56

Re: Mozart In The Fall

#3 Post by Billy » 19 Dec 2022, 19:33

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.

BobBradshaw
Posts: 2683
Joined: 03 Jun 2016, 21:03

Re: Mozart In The Fall

#4 Post by BobBradshaw » 19 Dec 2022, 21:15

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...

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