Mozart In California Poem by gershon hepner

Mozart In California



Far better than the sun that shines
each day in California, where
I've fallen for its food and wines
idyllically in western air,
is Mozart whom the radio plays
before I sleep and when I wake,
a flourish for the fleeting days
that moves my heart and makes it quake
as surely as the shaken earth
when off the Richter scale, with sound
that makes me feel that life is worth
the risk of faults beneath the ground.


Line 7 would read 'whose flourish flavors fleeting days' except that Linda feels that such alliterative virtuosity has a schizophrenic flaw. On June 3,2003 my Gibraltarian class of 1963 beau-of-the bells of St. Mary’s colleague Sam Benady congratulated Linda as a voice of sanity but added:

I'm all for schizophrenic alliteration! You wouldn't remember, but I once submitted a comic verse to you for the Gazette which included, if my memory serves me, the line 'For fear he'd feel forlorn to feel the fate of fellow fowl'! ! Those 'Fs' again! If that's schizophrenia, I have a 40 year history!

I submitted the above poem to JAMA which published the following poem by Robert Layzer, MD from Mill Valley, CA (415 388 8227) on May 28,2003. He called me on 6 27 03 and told me that he was a retired neurologist who had published a poem in one of the first issues of Paris Review.


Haydn-Quartett

In heaven it seems angels play Haydn quartets
in rooms much like the one shown in this cheap
hand-colored German print, where bourgeois gentlemen
with wigs and silk knee-breeches stroke their viols.
At left, three mob-capped ladies are delighted;
a studious listener stands behind the cello
with folded arms, and through the doorway comes
a well-fed pastor, not too late he hopes.
So it is in heaven. But I had a patient once-
a doctor, too, as young as Keats-who listened
to Mozart all day long on his white bed,
waiting for a brain bubble to burst again.
When the time came, I could not stop his rush
To heaven. Such impatience! That was twenty
Or thirty years ago, and still I suppose
He is listening, listening, much as I do now
On this balmy evening, here by the Pacific,
Listening to Haydn warble about heaven.

1/15/2001

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