Fine Arts And Residues Poem by Ananta Madhavan

Fine arts that leave no tangible residue,
Like music, drama, ballet,
Are harder to evaluate
Than painting, which leaves
An earnest of its visitation
In a picture; or a page of words,
Or a monument, a sculpture,
A building assertively three dimensional.


Music is resistant to arbiters,
Because no words give purchase to
The living feel of truly listening to it.
The song bird winging into cloudland,
The Mozart symphony in G-minor,
And the rhythms that cannot be caught
By putting metronomes to the waves of the sea:
Such works resist the verbal verdict.

They happen in evanescence.