TO THE MUSIC OF MOZART

Symphony No. 27 in G, K. 199: Second Movement, Andante

In Memoriam

Louis Dollarhide

William Horan 

Smiling, three women come into the salon,
Three young women under the high ceiling.

They curtsey together and, turning and circling,
Smoothly they move to invisible music

While all around them the mute world is sleeping,
Feeling the hush of the late afternoon.

Softly the strings sound—and clarinet and flute,
Two shafts of bright sunlight in a shadowy room.



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Photo from http//:greatriftvalley.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html

RILKE IN THE LIBRARY

Neither a prophet nor a man possessed
with eyes of wildfire and haywire hair,
the quiet expert in the window there
brings nothing new to feed your chic unrest.

Beside gigantic fronds, half hidden by
the out-sized sofas of the Reading Room,
a hunter stalks among the elephants.
Unlike the bright birds and the beasts of prey,
he does not shoulder through the alien gloom
with tribal arrogance, gauche elegance.

His disappearance is the only hint
of the movement of the mind behind it—

A study by da Vinci, a shark's fin
shearing the water as it zeroes in


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Portrait from areyouindecisive.tumblr.com, April 2008
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AT SEA

Night comes, releasing me
and free as a ship at sea, with all around
only the spun horizon by
triangulation from the stars
to tell
and out into the star-expanded space
my thoughts pursue the still
still changing souls

. . . and bodies lie
like ore in the mother-lode
the ages vent their pressure in
the subterranean chambers of the brain
slow, dissolve, and crystals realign

imponderably Earth inclines
toward where all meet
what sustains
what sustains the planet as

and huger more oppressive each next day's
juggernaut unretarded overtakes
what sustains

what

darkly . . .

Stars

beneath the Earth






Off the island of Key West, 1970
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