The sonnet sequence, "My Human Disguise," of 600 ekphrastic poems, was begun February 2011 and completed January 15, 2022. It can be found beginning with the January 20, 2022 post and working backwards. Going forward are 20 poems called "Terzata," beginning on January 27, 2022. Thirty more Terzata can be found among the links on the right. A new series of dramatic monologues follows on the blog roll, followed by a series of formal poems, each based on a single word.
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Thursday, October 18, 2012
Four Riffs on "Three Musicians" (Picasso)
#87
A tune is the ultimate abstraction,
An emotion expressed as a fraction.
Some notes invariably repeated
Become a cold emotion reheated.
Not all musicians are made of music.
Some are talent, some mere facility.
The best I've known live a necessity,
Like physicists slave to mathematics.
Picasso's clowns can only make us dance,
Twist our senses into a whirling trance.
I've wept at the silence a conductor
Held at the end of the Ninth of Mahler,
As if to say, "Behold what's gone before --
Anguish, redemption, hope -- and don't despair."
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