ROBERT
KELLY

Now we have opened the moon

now listen carefully

now place those semi-precious

memories—lapis afternoons,

garnet sunsets, onyx swoons

of passion midnights—

safely inside its hollow shell.

Bell.  Listen for the sound it makes

as it remembers and lets you forget.

This is healing.  This is his touch.

7 March 2019

So assume every note

in Brahms’ Handel Variations for piano

is a word.

Who can speak so quickly?

What would they be saying?

Is it music’s glory

that we’ll never know?

And yet someone wrote it down,

clearly, in context and in place,

and last night Misha Dichter

pronounced it with his fingertips—

a lost gospel, an instruction

manual for an undreamt machine?

6 March 2019