On Seeing a Lock of Beethoven’s Hair On YouTube
“This relic allows me to relive his presence,
to relive his inspirational words…” – winning bidder
1.
it’s just a thing see
tawny even earthy
and yet looked over
closely and it glitters
in its streaks of silver
like the stars
a labyrinth in miniature
it leads only to its ends
to its own thinginess
in fact it’s practically
a nautilus of hair
a shell abandoned
washed up strewn
along the shore
of a stranger’s hand
if one tilts it to the light
if one handles it with care
with reverence and with love
it’s suddenly abracadabra
poof a tiara
no wait
a crown
2.
consider then that mystery
of his Immortal Beloved
of the love letters never sent
the way the unsaid when it’s left
unchecked will enact itself
like a memory
one could only imagine
such trembling in the man’s
heart the seismographic
scratches off the hand and pen
from there the abracadabra
transmutation to music
to the sculpture gardens
planted in the ear which
though they raise as much
gooseflesh as there are
grains of sand could never
quite conjure make manifest
the Beloved’s presence
then or now
again
3.
Perhaps this bidder’s
giddiness all his
hyperbole
reliving some man’s
presence some man’s
inspirational
words is possibly
more right than even
he in fact
would suppose
after all when
Gertrude Stein
complained
this portrait doesn’t
look like me
what did Picasso say
but with a wink
it will
as the composer
left his words locked
up in a drawer
as his Beloved grew
larger than his mind
did absence too
grow more distant
till the distances
themselves
became just about
the size of everything
she left present
4.
yes it may just be
that Beethoven
the name the long
scattered synecdoche
the posters the towels
the documentaries
is in part greater
than the sum of a whole
that within a single
tremble of another’s
hand bearing a lock of
the tawniest most silvery
hair exists more of
the man than was ever borne
by his soles
.
Christopher Kobylinsky’s poetry has previously appeared in Grey Hands, Unleash Lit, and Poor Yorick Journal. He currently lives in New England.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 