Art: Contemplation by Alexey Adonin
THE PIANO
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”
I.
I’m in a dwelling that does not exist
although here I am now in the dream—
maybe an amalgam of previous domiciles
or someplace I’ve forgotten about
or a new structure altogether
although it has the tang of familiarity.
There’s the old battered upright spinet
we had on Columbus Street
at the beginning of time.
Dad played Chopin when we were kids
and we too practiced scales and arpeggios
after lessons with Miz Gomez round the corner
on Galvez across from the massive nunnery
where we watched Little Sisters of Charity
float across the upper vestibules as if
buoyed by air.
And it seems I am also lodged within a vestibule,
the long hall of this house—with other rooms
spilling from its nether wall. I’m here with the mover,
a burly, cigar-smoking guy, who will transport
all the packed boxes onto his truck
parked outside on the curb.
It is midnight
and no moon illuminates the silhouettes lurking outside
though we know they are there, comingling.
The front flood lights are broken. Only one bulb
dangling from an electrical cord lights up the room.
This is no swanky place. It’s a place of last resort
and I am trying to get out with the help of the mover.
He says we must junk the piano. It’s ruined—
the ivory plates of the white keys are missing,
the black keys, the sharps and flats, are smashed
into the keyboard, the pedals frozen in place,
its finish flaking off, a few jagged holes in the casing.
I tell him no, I must have the piano. I have lugged it
around many states during the diaspora of my youth
until it became such a burden I returned it . . .
to my mother’s house, which also no longer exists
except as a shell of its former self.
Somewhere along the line the piano disappeared,
probably appropriated by a friend or relative.
I don’t know where it is, but it’s here, now.
So I will carry it with me again.
Mover says he can lift it by himself.
He’s a strong, strong, frowning man.
II.
I am reminded of Citizen Kane’s hoarse whisper,
“Rosebud,” as he lay dying, then the segue
to that cherished childhood sled consumed in flames,
along with enormous mounds of possessions.
Chopin’s lungs. Byron’s bladder. Einstein’s
brain pickled in a Mason jar, Schumann’s mind,
Shelley’s heart.
Or Tutankhamun’s blue sailboat I saw at the
exhibit in Philadelphia. All is vanity, spake
the Preacher. It is still midnight. I hear
the silhouettes whispering outside, hoarsely.
I want to sever them from this dream.
They don’t belong. Mover is gone too
and all the boxes. Only the piano remains.
He refused to haul it after all.
My father is playing a Chopin nocturn
on its wrecked keys, my sister an arpeggio.
I plunk the one solid note left—F major.
Flames combust throughout the room.
But nothing burns. This fire is music.
The piano, newborn, shines and gleams
as it did on Columbus Street, that original dream.
DRIZZLE
I’m ready to write a poem but nothing comes—
You know the feeling, a concoction
Of apprehension and anticipation, a sideshow
Of circus clowns and angels pirouetting on the head of a pin
So I take a walk in the drizzle, a long one, seeking—
Look the baseball team practicing in such muck
Blasting loud rap into the atmosphere, ruining the atmosphere
With noise, which is the negation of information
According to Szilard and the theorists of such stuff . . .
And it occurs to me that I’m stuck in “Ulalume”
By Edgar A. Poe, the misty mid region of Weir
Down by the dank tarn of Auber
And the drizzle drizzles on and I’m sick of it, a whole week now—
Gloom and dismal foreboding, the pathetic fallacy
Grant me that nothing new under the sun, SUN, where are you?
Need some of your Vitamin D suffused in the cosmic rays.
The question is: how to get out of here? How Hawaiify?
I must listen again to Gorecki’s “Beatus Vir”
No, that won’t do it, that would crash you down to hell,
So something light and airy, some vapid ditty,
Gidget goes Canary Islands—wait! That volcano lava
Spewing from the bowels, snaking through villages
Like the angel of death, that green gas in Cecil B. DeMille’s movie,
The mother of beauty (who said that? I know who said that)
Not true, Wallace, or if it is, what a price to pay, eh?
The beauty of deliquescence? I’d call that ugly
Given the eternal compound interest rate . . .
Ok, I’m back at the Subaru, glazed with drizzle.
Nothing came.
TRAIN OF THOUGHT: 1-20-23
I stepped on a crack.
Hope I didn’t break my mother’s back.
Never know what’s true or not.
I sit shotgun, again waiting
for the women who have dispersed
into the bowels of an emporium.
Yesterday I re-discovered “My Horses
Ain’t Hungry” and felt the resurgence
of an old joy.
Is music always there to be plucked
from the air by those with the great luck
of attunement with the Muse?
I flip a few pages of The Century of Fire
and scan poetic blurbs on Einstein,
FDR, Faulkner and the United Fruit Company.
I slide out of the bucket seat to stretch
and stroll a bit in the parking lot.
I have spent half my life waiting
for something greater than I can imagine,
something that will edify and help clarify
the otherwise chaos of existence.
Back in the car I hear a report on NPR
about the Joy Project inspired
by the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu.
Think I’ll sign up, why not?
Though I know where specks of joy are to be found:
when your mind shifts toward the thing-at-hand
and empties itself of all else, especially itself,
when, for instance, you engage with your dog
or sniff a rose or taste a liquor never brewed
And, ah, here they come, having found
what they sought, cheerful and relieved—
and thus I too, cheerful and relieved.
Because what else is there, however fluid,
however ephemeral, however immediate
and original, if only for the nonce,
nonce alchemized into the summun bonum,
the sine qua non, the sublime grace note
nestled within another unfinished symphony?
About the author:
Five volumes of Louis Gallo’s poetry, Archaeology, Scherzo Furiant, Crash, Clearing the Attic and Ghostly Demarcation & The Pandemic Papers are now available. Why is there Something Rather than Nothing? and Leeway & Advent will be published soon.
He was invited for an interview and reading of his work by National Public Radio’s program “With Good Reason,” broadcast across the country, 2021.
His work appears in Best Short Fiction 2020. A novella, “The Art Deco Lung,” will soon be published in Storylandia. National Public Radio aired a reading and discussion of his poetry on its “With Good Reason” series (December 2020).
His work has appeared or will shortly appear in Wide Awake in the Pelican State (LSU anthology), Southern Literary Review, Fiction Fix, Glimmer Train, Hollins Critic, Rattle, Southern Quarterly, Litro, New Orleans Review, Xavier Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Texas Review, Baltimore Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Ledge, storySouth, Houston Literary Review, Tampa Review, Raving Dove, The Journal (Ohio), Greensboro Review, and many others.
Chapbooks include The Truth Changes, The Abomination of Fascination, Status Updates and The Ten Most Important Questions. He is the founding editor of the now defunct journals, The Barataria Review and Books: A New Orleans Review. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize several times. He is the recipient of an NEA grant for fiction. He teaches at Radford University in Radford, Virginia.
In the artist’s words:
An abstract-surrealist artist living in Jerusalem, Israel, Alexey Adonin has dedicated over one and a half-decades to convey his vision of hidden otherworldly realms. Alexey believes that art is not only a way to express ourselves but also a unique key to unlocking the knowledge of the hidden world. In his creative endeavor, he tries to apply a more philosophical approach and to hint at the mystical origin of all things. Alexey mostly strives to get away from banal copying of reality, preferring instead to create one of his own—something that somehow reflects his inner world.
www.instagram.com/otherworldlydream/