I feel like explaining something.
When I lived through those days,
my private score was always Brecht and Weill,
oompah-dark and clarinet snaky.
That man I loved had a photograph of Weill
and would claim he was his father.
We had all come to believe in them,
and knew that only they had understood us;
they had predicted us.
How tough and paradoxical and worldly we were;
how still in love with the tuneful
and the heartbroken, but that was before
we had any idea what heartbroken was.
Now that I do, as I remember, the music
that swells beneath me is Mozart’s,
those icy cosmic jests, the fixed fates
of lovers who betray and the world that spins forward
mechanically, no matter
what the price, as money itself grinds forward
and leaves the sparrow pulped beneath the taxi tire,
get used to it
and hear meanwhile the soaring soprano
who sings her own sweet “yes”
and will change it in the next line
because Lorenzo Da Ponte always tied the knot
in such a way that the bow, so big and pretty,
might yet slip.