Oh Ghosts Of My Music, When Will We Depart (Final Version) Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

oh ghosts of my music
when will we depart
I will not leave without you.

here on the old rolls the census of your notes
has been taken. they will not hold you
those who dislike your art
who think it some dead joke
this classical music

and sneer at the comfort with which
you comforted me
the child that I am that I was
the starriness with which I regarded you when
the composers in plaster of paris molded

the days into a kind of snow in my Grandmother's studio.
sparkling and vast.
oh may these bright feelings last

perhaps I prayed
over the etudes
and what I couldn't play or badly
I could listen to, all the great translations
of Infinity

I'm weeping into these transcriptions
as if they were your griefs, made manifest.
and I have heard your violins, your pianos

the flowering glissandos and the harp's
descrescendo in order to forestall all deaths
all deserts to outlast
under your invisible palms.
though you are delicate, kaleidoscopic, fraught

mirage-like you are not.
though knaves might wish it so
more solid than their schemes
who live to banish you.

as if they could and all my dreams
before I ever spoke or wrote upon the air
feelings like lightning lost despairs
who breathed Heaven into our exile

becoming the fairytale wood and
as if you were a Heart and understood
childhoods flighty sorrows ephemeral
and strange
and chartered the countries where we
joy, apart. then as now.
and always.

mary angela douglas 26 january 2015; 11 november 2023