Oh Ghosts Of My Music, When Will We Depart 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.
the composers in plaster of paris mold

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

perhaps you prayed
over the etudes your contemporaries
cast aside.

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 outlast these deserts
under your invisible palms.

mirage-like you are not.
more solid than their schemes
who live to banish you.

as if they could
who breathed Heaven into our exile
as if you were a Heart

and chartered the countries where we
joy, apart.

mary angela douglas 26 january 2015