“Your B string is flat,” began the rehearsal. The words ricocheted off the clever convecting walls and sound panels of the concert hall. In this room, on this raised platform, Louis was who he was meant to be. When the orchestra played, he was where he belonged. Regal. Poised. Ready for a war of culture, waged against the uncultured masses.

The conductor swept across the stage in a dizzying mass of repugnance, for some, and elation for others. Louis fit into the latter category.

It was the stage where Louis was broken, reborn, tossed aside, built back up, and made stronger, tempered by the searing flames of the audience. Would they laugh when he tripped? Would they cry when he sang the complicated melodies of the arias he wrote with his own hands?

“Your B string is still flat,” cried Louis, frustrated.Why won’t they just tune their fucking instruments?

—-

The audience filed into the concert hall, beginning the opening night of Louis’s newest arrangement. The conductor strode across the stage, heralded by applause, and the blacks and whites of the musicians’ garbs raised their mahogany instruments, bidden by a single gesture from the man they knew as their leader on this battlefield. Louis was another tactician, not a general, and he had no power here.

When the B strings were still flat, Louis sang the notes flat, hoping to God the audience, the enemy, couldn’t hear. This was Bay of Pigs. This was supposed to be a cultural A-Bomb, but it went horribly, horribly wrong.

The instruments lowered and the audience clapped. Left. The stage was empty.

Louis cried, “Your B strings are still flat,” to no one and left the stage.

It’s a grail quest for the
purest lines, end game
sonnets and limericks,
stanzas warping epically into
endless misfires, friendly firing
at the starving muse.
Every pen stroke collects pieces
of the shattered map that
I know will lead me to freedom,

but patience has never been
a virtue of mine, and I can
never keep enough ink in my barrel.

whatshouldwecallgradschool:

WITH MY GRAD SCHOOL FRIENDS:

WITH REGULAR PEOPLE:

Atlantis, by Mark Doty

I thought your illness a kind of solvent
dissolving the future a little at a time,

I didn’t understand what’s to come
was always just a glimmer

up ahead, veiled like the marsh
gone under its tidal sheet

of mildly rippling aluminum.
What these salt distances were

is also where they’re going:
from blankly silvered span

toward specificity: the curve
of certain brave islands of grass,

temporary shoulder-wide rivers
where herons ply their twin trades

of study and desire. I’ve seen
two white emissaries unfold

like heaven’s linen, untouched,
enormous, a fluid exhalation. Early spring,

too cold yet for green, too early
for the tumble and wrack of last season

to be anything but promise,
but there in the air was white tulip,

marvel, triumph of all flowering, the soul
lifted up, if we could still believe

in the soul, after so much diminishment…
Breath, from the unpromising waters,

up, across the pond and the two-lane highway,
pure purpose, over the dune,

gone. Tomorrow’s unreadable
as this shining acreage,

the future’s nothing
but this moment’s gleaming rim.

Now the tide’s begun
its clockwork turn, pouring,

in the day’s hourglass,
toward the other side of the world,

and our dependable marsh reappears
—emptied of that starched and angular grace

that spirited the ether, lessened,
but here. And our ongoingness,

what there’ll be of us? Look,
love, the lost world

rising from the waters again:
our continent, where it always was,

emerging from the half-light, unforgettable,
drenched, unchanged.