Dichterliebe

The young man sings with such rich exactness

From the whitewashed chancel in the sun:

The German poet is breaking his heart with idealism.

The singer's woman looks on, slim and beautiful.

Ich liebe dich! It is real between them:

They hold hands with such excitement afterwards.

Wonderful thrilling songs! Gone with the last humming wire.

Heine's grief buried in a monstrous coffin, he said.

At home again, I read you the words of the songs in the sun,

Then cut them up with scissors to amuse the baby.

As we walk in the long grass you place my hand on your breast:

The garden is transformed into a green arena of expectancy.

I recall the music strumming on, the declamation,

The bitter sadness. Somehow they never met,

Poet and woman. Worse, say the stone skulls on the wall:

The wretched woman was no more than a screen,

The poet's plaintive anguish kneels at his own projections:

‘O split-off self, I love you, you are so pure.’

So plangent, the exquisite art of self-torment.

At the end of his charming interpretation

The young man turns to brown skin and long fair hair:

I walk in the dampening long grass, aware of your moving thighs:

Poor Heine can go and bury himself and his self-defeating lies!

DAVID HOLBROOK

Schumann's Fantasy for Piano in C Major

In the country of longing, an endless road

loops the towns but never goes in.

C Major, the key this piece calls home,

is alluded to, circled again and again

(like the unreachable home in dreams)

but never arrived at until the end.

Strangely enough, you never mind;

you fall in love with the road instead.

C Major, affirming and uncomplex,

the first key any musician learns,

suitable for nursery rhymes

and for the stateliest anthems, seems

a brighter, more miraculous place

when it's encircled from outside.

I loved this piece at seventeen;

I thought I could reach C Major then.

Thirty years later, an old hand

at calling the country of longing home,

I prowl the place behind closed eyes

where long-remembered music lies.

Schumann's voice, flung like a dare,

summons the loves I coveted most,

pulls them from their prisons in time

and makes me view them yet again.