Love Song, 2018
I dreamt that I was
walking. The dusty
smell of desert
struck me. Then I heard
the sound of trumpets
from another ridge, the looping,
pure-note tuning that
once sent beast to battle, that same
singing sound which toppled
oligarchies now accompanies
the jazzy musings of
young women in apartment
buildings re-arranging
flowers in their sweatpants.
I have driven
to Big Sur; I have watched the light change,
refract wind and sand off windows,
I have polished doorknobs
just to see a brighter gold and
watched green apples gleam in the
heat of a February noon.
I have turned in indecision;
I have woken to the linger
of a tune.
Hot and dozing
though I was, I still was walking, still
could dream: and dreamt
of thick and feather boas draped
on shoulders in cigar-smoke gloom,
an idle barefoot padding on
the hardwood or, the whiz of records
whirring, while the sunbeams made
the carpet bloom
beneath the music
from another room.
It returned me, and I turned back from
the wall; slammed the door, said,
it wasn’t what I meant, at all;
said, I treasure my disasters
with my triumphs; my trumpet
heralds all. Her timbre peals
through windowed streets, lingers
universally; she sings a symphony
of places, scrawled on candied
sheets. She sings of blue walls singing
for the sea. I recall a little recklessly
beneath those pink-and-yellow striped marquees.
Though I do not think that she
has noticed me. I was
walking, wandering
the works and days
of fingers, feet, I was about
to eat, to roll away the years, the stone,
to clean, to turn, to cross
the bridge—when
the sound of trumpets
woke me
from a distant ridge.
Which stands for nothing
except what it is.
Love Song, 2018. Literature.
The first lines of this poem came to me when I was, in fact, walking, and really heard the sound of trumpets from my hot and dusty path in the upper ridges of the Berkeley Fire Trails. Its music is in part inspired by T. S. Eliot’s famous “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” which has been ringing in my head since I first read it at the age of 14. Like most poems, Love Song is, in part, a poem about poetry, and the act of making: the distance between the poetic speaker and the writer, the struggle to join and find common threads between disparate images, the creation of a world in which sonics are as important as semantics. While seemingly allegorical, the poem was also intended as a backlash against the endless whorl of interpretations that accompany poetics: the dream in fact a dream, the walk in fact a walk, the trumpets in fact trumpets. Though of course ultimately failing to diminish their symbolic potential for readers of the poem, I still wanted to think about the differential significances inherent in and following from such assumptions, even within myself.