Scriabin’s Divine Symphony

Scriabin’s Divine Symphony

of round clouds full of stars

sheen of those bloodless

gentlemen we call music

part story and part machine

the friction within a single body

when “he walks into the garden,

she steps behind a tree.” Tom

said. Anything we make goes up.

And the stars twinkle because

they are far away. We are so smart.

2.

I too was such a cloud

whose stars are fixt, blades

bridges ever keen on the real.

Stars descend to the real that

twinkles with the eyes of concealed

lions, or lost rings, or was it

soul. I’m trying to read his text

but I dropped my stars somewhere

between the minds of others

and they partnered dazzling

letters from the other side of the end

of the world: see, through my empty 

eyes, they shine predicates that tell–

make sure you die before you get back home.

3.

In stories within stories

I can’t see behind this tree

to tell if this is divine, 

check the tracks of this image

sick with science. Despite my brazen

neglect to die, if we’re very quiet

the helpers will bring a mirror

to her folded within the forest.

4.

The clouds of those we were

surround us with their lawless bodies

music sounds like its ours

while they work to extract

their mortal loss. And they try,

we try a little too, to help

so I could almost weep for them.

5.

The ghosts of libretti in meter

flounce into the mind as if

to drown themselves; virgins

divine thoughts that would not be measured

who die in order to hold her image.

Lisp her name through the skeletons

of ghosts. Dawn lives in rhyming poems.