My heart is playing

      Glenn Gould’s Sonatas – Fantasies Variations over & over, day after 

           day.    Sublime, tragic, joy-sorrow-

                                         ful, heart-rending, heart-

                       filling. 

      Vibrating strings pull the soul’s sinew, tiptoe over your grave of dreams. Awake to lull 

into neverending sleep. 


       So you dance, a marionette of his fingers, the sensitivity of his touch on your black

& white keys

                     cast 

in sunlight and shadows over the ground outside. 

                     Can your dangling feet dance faster? Slower?

Pitch

                                                                                                      of splintering

                                                                                  glass.

                                         A colossal public square,

                                                   churches and music halls,

                                                                                  crystal panes

          raining.

                               Sharp shards in air.

Empty courtyard,                                                        mist lit by a rising sun,

                                         the silverless mirrors, prismatic—

                                                                        never hit-

                                                                                        ting

                                         the catastrophe of ground.

Intense chromatic moments         of notes                             waver            in-process,

                                                              delicacy & trails & lively crescendos.

                                         Time becomes space.

                                                                                                                 Trill floating

                                                                        Escher glass-stairs of notes.

                               A cathedral of crystalline arrhythmic intervals.

                     Without tonal centres,

                               clusters echo clusters,

          flutes, violin, saxophone,

                                                                        this lullaby of gentle notes,

                                                              that tempest of cymbals drumming a glass-

                               bottomed boat torpedoing

                                                                        a furious ocean.

                     Loneliness, an open-ended disjunctive divine embrace.

                                                                        Fresh, clear

                                                                                             as the thrill of dawn.

Inspired by Tatar-Russian composer, Sophia Gubaidulina’s Modern Classical oeuvre.

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Brenda Clews is a poet who dances. She’s had two books published, Tidal Fury (Guernica Editions, 2016) and Fugue in Green (Quattro Books, 2017). She’s also an artist, a video poet, an editor. and runs a quarterly poetry and singer/songwriter event called Minstrels & Bards in Toronto, Canada. Her website is brendaclews.com