Contributor Series 9: If Men Had Ears
To All the Music I Will Never Hear
By Louis Gallo
You’re driving around, switching stations,
and out flows a new Beatles song,
something you’d missed, or, shifting to NPR,
a little Mozart motet takes you unaware.
So much lost throughout history,
no archeological remains, vanished, no trace,
and all the beauty still to be written
after you’ve smoldered …
can only imagine it, crave–
Beethoven’s Twelfth chorus, canons, God–
or maybe Roy Orbison crooning
from the grave, Schubert weeping
the salt of dark melody. I’ll miss it alright,
and all that other good stuff, the already heard,
miss that too, since you never catch every
grace note and nuance, never get enough,
savor fully, never forget.
Almost sounds like sex. Friends, it is.
Louis Gallo’s most recent poem here was Faust Now, published in June 2011.
Nice poetic symphony.