1st Movement

gentle byzantine attic lamplight,  

outside streetlight alabaster snow

brushing through Seine River willows,

C minor impressionist midnight occasional breeze

Satie sips absinthe by a window

dreaming of fish,

stoically staring at the crescendoing dusk,

randomly warming his pumice-raked hands over a wood stove,

his umbrellas populating a distant room

his spectral fingers flying across apparitional minimalist keyboards,  

88 keys,

thrice over

2nd Movement

Satie's moist green eyes close

beholding Sunflowers, Sutras, Wheatfields…

conceiving classical sparkling rainbows

pony-tailed Clichy girls 

Honfleur moons, uncertain hues

as the curtain rises…

3rd Movement

Erik's eyes close once more:

capturing a voice in his mind’s eye...

a velvet figure accompanies his clumsy laughter

sustained by declamando chords,

their each step ambiguous

eyes avoiding any glimpse of sunshine 

at all costs:

a widower’s sparse religion

4th Movement

silver teardrop raindrops

shadow a bittersweet playground,

a park of overgrown 

willow reeds, rushes,

as stray pelicans hover

then flutter and drift on,

the warm cryptic lake

faintly ripples

infiltrating his heart,

Satie envisioning ballerina boats skirting about

and Bastille dancers devoid of gravity

arabesque along the shore

in blue green minor chords:

is there a parade for Erik Satie somewhere?

5th Movement

one late night while 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- here, let me take your coat…yes? oui, you are shivering! there, there, good! a bit of Cognac would do you fine.”

“I do so love practicing your new concerto even though this piano sometimes flattens those minor chords", she commented.

“which is precisely why I have prepared another piano above this one! simplicity may now 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

would welcome no other,

again a mourner devoid of companionship,

a single repeated chord 

expressing the dissonance of unrequited love,

a waxen effigy reburned to a wax drip,

with only his masterpiece Gymnopédies surviving:

French dada wheatfields frozen,

Van Gogh’s sunflowers fossilized, 

Satie's epic sutra forever unrealized 

Delray Beach, FL

Summer, 2014