The Flautist

A poet elucidates what song imitates, where love labors, and

Beauty may very well be antecedent:

Namely, a minor rearranging of some major functions

So that you feel with your bones and think from the spirit and

Your five senses go about the others business; better known as nonsense,

Better known as Wonder, which no man or woman can make sense of.

There are places in a woman you never hear speak

Until the embrace of thought and body, when

What is felt in her is heard by him as distinctly

Were she a flute carrying just the one note,

Ribbon-like, pure and untranslatable.

When you can taste with your eyes and listen with your hands you become

A kind of contortionist, a marvelous lover, a poet –

Someone who spends the better part of their life chasing after ways

To explain the phenomenon of passion to the flautist who condescends

To the lover, dancer and poet at once with a single phrase, ghostly and solvent,

Commanding your net income of sorrow to be reckoned with that very moment –

To move, one must be malleable and come alive.