AN IDEA OF IMPROVISATION FOR VIOLIN AND VIOLA
(for Hilary Hahn)
Almost the way
one of your fingers
could begin a slide—
a bending in pitch—
or insinuate a query
which might caress
or pinch one fret
until a layer
of certainty sounds
as if it’s unpeeling
from two citrus bodies
—say a blood or
navel orange—
and yet not a ‘sound’
as in some long passage
connecting two bodies
of water below
a duvet of darkness
or waves of intonation
from my lips
making the leaps
of a ghazal
into the sea
of a secret which
—when you toss
your hair that way—
seems to flicker like
what in softer light
could be called
abandon.
But sound—
and only now
while orange petals
warm the air
above the curl
of a wick—
as if we too
could become notes
huddled so close
beside a Trouble Clef
that even as
one knows it shouldn’t
another begins to silken
into a scarf of sigh
—pianissimo as budding violets—
or perhaps warns
a bare stretch
of your thigh or my neck
of what surely must lie
buried beneath
our uncertainty,
now muscular,
where we imagine
said blood or
navel orange’s
silent ache
or don’t—
as if only until dawn,
as if only until
a filament
—of that flickering light—
feels prone to rise or fall
like a lip of red chrysanthemum
on a ridge of collarbone.
