Oh to be Charles Ives, who wrote for the future
and lived in an organized present,
who filed away each symphony
in a leather sleeve and took the train
from a garden house in Connecticut
to a seat at a corporate desk. Think of Mozart,
wild with sorrow, dodging debtors, out of work,
and Ives is on his train ride watching trees arrange their boughs.
He hasn’t had a concert in twenty years,
and there he is, beating out dissonant lines
on his two pressed lapels.
He’s not the cat that ate the bright canary
but the cat who holds the bright canary live
inside the mouth. He’s the cat that feels it breathing,
the cat that will not speak or smile,
the cat that godly patience fills with peace.
from Ambit