Poem: "Flute Music"
Flute Music
How will I open the window, unless I’m crazy?
How will I close it, unless I’m holy?
Adélia Prado, “Serenade”
His flute bends the garden around the moon,
enclosing the light of the new moon in roses.
The roses dissolve and when they condense
on their stalks they are redder than before.
This goes on for a long time. His flute bends time
and the moon obeys, falling and rising like water
along the curve of its light, grazing the wide lip
of the parapet, the intricate balcony, the eaves,
and at the top of the note joining moon and music
falls on the roses condensing into red.
She listens at her window, unable to go or stay.
Behind a rosebush I crouch, waxing and waning.
*
Besides Prado's poem, Debussy's Syrinx and Prélude á l’après-midi d’un faune were also in my head when I was writing this poem. As was Paul Morrison's Little Ashes, the 2008 film about the thwarted love between Federico García Lorca (Javier Beltrán) and Salvador Dali (Robert Pattinson). The film is rather conventional in many ways, but one scene sticks to the mind. Unwilling to give himself to Lorca, Dali masturbates in a corner as he watches Lorca fuck his friend Magdalena in bed. Lorca climaxes, eyes locked with Dali's. Gay sex through the body of a woman.
From the Observer review of the movie:
How will I open the window, unless I’m crazy?
How will I close it, unless I’m holy?
Adélia Prado, “Serenade”
His flute bends the garden around the moon,
enclosing the light of the new moon in roses.
The roses dissolve and when they condense
on their stalks they are redder than before.
This goes on for a long time. His flute bends time
and the moon obeys, falling and rising like water
along the curve of its light, grazing the wide lip
of the parapet, the intricate balcony, the eaves,
and at the top of the note joining moon and music
falls on the roses condensing into red.
She listens at her window, unable to go or stay.
Behind a rosebush I crouch, waxing and waning.
*
Besides Prado's poem, Debussy's Syrinx and Prélude á l’après-midi d’un faune were also in my head when I was writing this poem. As was Paul Morrison's Little Ashes, the 2008 film about the thwarted love between Federico García Lorca (Javier Beltrán) and Salvador Dali (Robert Pattinson). The film is rather conventional in many ways, but one scene sticks to the mind. Unwilling to give himself to Lorca, Dali masturbates in a corner as he watches Lorca fuck his friend Magdalena in bed. Lorca climaxes, eyes locked with Dali's. Gay sex through the body of a woman.
From the Observer review of the movie:
In typically vivid language, Dali, who married in 1934, denied their relationship ever became physical. 'He was homosexual, as everyone knows, and madly in love with me,' he said, according to Alain Bosquet's 1969 Conversations with Dali. 'He tried to screw me twice... I was extremely annoyed, because I wasn't homosexual, and I wasn't interested in giving in. Besides, it hurts. So nothing came of it. But I felt awfully flattered vis-à-vis the prestige. Deep down I felt that he was a great poet and that I owe him a tiny bit of the Divine Dali's asshole.'
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