My favorite poems

The music was fidgety, arch, an orchestral version of twang. Welcome to atonal hell, welcome to the execution of a theory, I kept thinking, thinking, thinking. I hadn't felt a thing. Was it old fashioned of me to want to? Or were feelings, as usual, part of the problem? The conductor seemed to flail more than lead, his baton evidence of something unresolved, perhaps recent trouble at home. And though I liked the cellist— especially the way she held her instrument— unless you had a taste for unhappiness you didn't want to look at the first violinists face. My wife whispered to me This music is better than it sounds. I reminded myself the world outside might be a worse place than where I was now, though that seemed little reason to take heart. Instead I closed my eyes, thought about a certain mezzo soprano who could gladden a sad day anywhere, but one January night in Milan went a full octave into the beyond. Sometimes escape can be an art, or a selfishness, or just a gift you need to give yourself. Whichever, I disappeared for a while, left my body behind to sit there, nod, applaud at the appropriate time.

Under certain conditions, when the moon in the western sky seems frozen there, for instance even as the sun is rising in the east, so that soon two sides of the coin will be facing each other; or when the snow which is a stranger here fills our trees with its cold flowers; when the single bluejay at the feeder is so still it could be enameled there, then the earth becomes an emblem for whatever we believe.