AFTER A PIANO RECITAL

I’m one of the first to leave when we disperse
into the cold twilight of a tattered year.
Beethoven walks beside me in the furious
arpeggiated passions of his score.

After the major resolutions, after
applause, in the hiss of cars on a rainy street
the piano still finds no satisfactory answer
for the desperate hungers of the human soul.

It growls on and upward and I don’t know
where it might lead to, except it goes
with me, and I am walking home.
I wrap my serape closer against the rain.

We are in a war that is not war:
it has no end. This is a season of fear.
Still we continue on, continue out
into the winter night.

Originally published in Four Corners