Poems
TRILL AND MORDENT
...we [are] wrong to think of beauty
as those things we’ll never have.
~ Stephen Frech
Accidentals are symbols that change the pitch
with just the slightest touch of dissonance
in music— the flats, the sharps, the double
sharps’ spiked banners that appear sometimes once
on a page, sometimes in a series. Ascending or
descending
they become appoggiatura— trills or mordents. The trills
are as random birdsong strewn over a field. The
mordents
slip down, enough to remind me of their root in morbid
things, in falling, in death. The French, too,
remind us
how even in pleasure the body dies a little: la petite mort.
The furtive kiss on the earlobe, the flick of a
tongue
at the base of the throat— thin blade of a shudder that rises
to the heart and nicks it like a wound, that attaches
like a shadow. It takes so little to upset the mechanism
of everyday life, the rapid adjustment and tumbling
of gears
from one set of teeth to another. As though the hand could choose
without error, the composer made these precise
marks on sheets
of music. They bristle like little reports, like explosions
from the snout of a rifle angled through the window
of a van,
aimed at any head smooth as the next one that steps
out on a veranda, out of a building; that stoops
momentarily to tie a shoelace, to fumble for car keys.
Now the news every day is filled with how little
it takes to ignite the blunt wick of fear.
Late in the year, the body’s fat thickens
like tallow.
Ungathered fruit redden and fall in the yard,
and the afternoons descend a little faster toward
night.
Who can blame the one who becomes tired of the brooding
darkness, who wants to open the window and move
toward the leaves’ quick gesturings, to see what voice
repeats her name in a way she has not heard
since childhood, to discover which room in her body
houses the accidental sound of a tuning fork
struck and echoing in the middle of her life.
From Trill & Mordent
© September 2005, by Luisa Igloria
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