Sunflowers, Sutras, Wheatfields (for Erik Satie)

1^st Movement

attic gentle byzantine lamp,

outside streetlight alabaster snow

brushing across Seine River willows,

C minor occasional impressionist midnight breeze…

inside Satie sips absinthe

dreaming of fish,

staring stoically back at the crescendoing dusk,

abstractly warming his pumice-raked hands over wood stove,

umbrellas populating a distant room,

spectral fingers flying across imaginary minimalist keyboards,

88 keys,

twice over

2^nd Movement

his moist green eyes close…

Sunflowers, Sutras, Wheatfields…

classical broken rainbows

pony-tailed Clichy girls

Honfleur moon, uncertain hues…

the curtain rises…

3rd Movement

eyes close again…

a voice captured in his mind’s eye

a velvet figure accompanies himself

surrounding each declamando chord several times,

yet each step ambiguous

avoiding any glimpse of sunshine

at all costs…

a widower’s sparse religion

4th Movement

white teardrop diet

bittersweet playground,

park overgrown

willow reeds,

rushes,

stray pelicans hover,

flutter and drift on,

warm cryptic lake

faintly ripples

infiltrating his heart,

while ballerina boats skirt about devoid of gravity,

and Bastille dancers arabesque along the shore

chipmunksandmoths

alltogethernow…

is there a parade for Erik somewhere?

5th Movement

Erik absently looking up from his bench:

“Oh, didn’t hear you enter…care for some brandy? Still snowing out there?”

“Paris can be so unforgiving when we have one of these daunting April blizzards, no?”

“well, never mind- let me take your coat…yes? yes, you are shivering! There, yes! Some Cognac would do you fine.”

“I do so love practicing your new concerto even though this piano sometimes flattens those minor chords.”

“which is precisely why I have prepared another piano above this one! simplicity may be expressed in octaves!”

6th Movement

Suzanne left no farewell note

just a portrait

when the intensity became too much to bear,

and Satie’s room

welcomed no other,

a mourner devoid of companionship,

a single repeated chord

expressing the harmony of unrequited love,

waxen candles reburned to nothingness

only Gymnopédies survives-

French dada wheatfields forever frozen,

Van Gogh’s sunflowers forever fossilized,

artistic eternal sutra yet unrealized

Delray Beach, FL

Summer, 2014