On Rachmaninoff’s birthday

It is your 86th birthday / and I am sitting crying at the corner / of Ninth Street and Avenue A / one swallow doesn’t make a summer / this coffee is terribly tepid // sometimes the 2nd Symphony sounds like Purcell / sometimes it sounds like Wozzeck's last act // where is J.F. Donnelly and his Russian wolfhounds? / where is his wife, Helen? where is the cigar-smell / and the hootings in the studio while I practice? // a day of dismay is a day to remember / night doesn’t come, and feeling dissipates // as the disgusting blackness of light / refuses to go off and leave melancholy / to nourish its roots of perversity / perhaps it will turn green like a potato // the ability to sing is ordinary / the ability to play is exceptional // where we can shroud ourselves in the / mechanized clarity of emotional vandalism we / do not see your owlish obstinacy staring back