Shelburne Farms Coachyard, Swallows, Schubert

That you long for someone else, for a figure more intense,
Is no reason to deny the pleasure of this dying

Evening's arrangement: landscape, music, and swallows (a happy
Accident) flittering darkly, diving the pearl-gray air.

Let us say, tonight, it is enough, like Savage Landor's
Old philosopher, loving Nature and next to Nature, art,

Let us agree that the throbbing, agitated surface
Of air, this twilight, is all, if at times we insist

On raw drama and brassy emotion, and are never content
With anything less than the whole world, appalled at ambitions

We discover in ourselves, novelists with a plot for every name
And poets seducing every acquaintance, crazed hungers

For control and loss of control. Swallows in triplets
Bank and dart, past the four musicians whose wrists

Are vibrant and tensed, whose fingering is so rapt,
Whose arms sweep in sudden runs and long swoops

Of swallows down through the stable door, in dark stalls
And out again, as if flung in the air from uplifted hands,

An image, you argue, advancing a theme at the cost
Of clarity, a willful blurring of effect and cause,

But where do any of these arrangements begin
Unless in the rawness of our desires, our longing

For events to occur, to be undone, to be repeated?
For half of your life, you composed half a portrait

Of married bliss. Then, "one day," the predictable
Note, carefully placed, "I've met someone else, this

Amazing feeling will not subside," so. Your life's
pattern is changed forever in a stroke of apparent

Spontaneity, as if unimagined, like a woman
Who appears in the stable door during the allegro,

Arms folded, her long dark hair pulled tightly back,
Brooding on the music which is everything to her,

So wrapped in self she is unaware of rearranging
Swallows in flight. They swerve, brake, pause in air,

The cello rests in its downward rush, like a kiss
Held back before it is held and held again, the violin

Returning now with a sweet surprise, a simple twist,
Olivier's Othello saying again he loved not wisely,

Only too well, a voice rising at just that point
Where we most expect it to fall, the swallows racing higher

Through rising music, what joy more furious than this
Pursuit with all its power to say yes, or deny,

To repeat the arrangement differently, to gain
The world for the pleasure of throwing it all away.