Museum Pieces - Beloit Poetry Journal

ROBERT FARNSWORTH
Middle Age
Too early to fetch my son from his lesson,
I pull under the pines by the reservoir,
to find on the radio that most rarified
contrivance, opera: scheming, swordplay,
sorrowing song, pageantry, misapprehended love.
Something addles that tenor’s heart. That
soprano’s prayer is burning. Under a sheen
of top melt, the white lake is developing
a treacherous map of spring. Uncertain borders,
and for cold chambers locked below, random
spotlights. Lost in their own sufferings
or joys, even when briefly twined in duet,
the voices seem so isolated, abstract, pure.
Yet they sing about marriages, about love
that would swim or soar past the conventional,
the bleak. New happiness, new health. Heart
truth, refracted out of so much artifice.
It’s almost spring—time again to wonder
if I can still believe in not knowing better,
in marriages of metaphor, in the sudden, wild
plunges love demands, in beautiful causes
punished toward triumph. O gamuts of the spirit
so extravagantly voiced! Listen. But just
as words defeat the quest for the absolute,
so melody dazzles as much as constitutes
a passion for essence. It’s opera.
And that’s ice turning back into a lake.
Twenty years I have believed my work in this
world is to sing it back, believed. It’s too
late to know any better. But I don’t plunge
anymore where it’s forbidden. I listen only
from a distance to love’s wild credos.
This, now, this is too much, this entombed aria,
that we cherish most because it’s too late;
she won’t be saved, hauled up hand over hand
by an ardent angel, into the light of spring.
Once, years ago, in the presence of a woman,
I wept, as was my wont then, over some piece
of music, what I don’t recall. But if she
remembered that moment now, I wonder if
she’d suppose it just theatrical, or a souvenir
20 Beloit Poetry Journal Fall 2002
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