Don’t put off your shower any more
listening to Chopin.
Take the Preludes personally;
he’s telling you that he can describe a progression
that you yourself have been unable to see,
shapely, broad light at one-thirty,
evening traveling up a road,
an overcast day as gentle bones.
Don’t remember the music;
remember it as something obvious
that you are compelled, doomed, to obscure
and complicate. You erase it twice.
The first time
as you listened, unable
to have it,
the second time
as you were unable
to remember it.
Angry with Chopin,
what does he know?
The components of your dinner are waiting for you downstairs.
The golden evening takes flat, slow turns outside.
Become gray.
Listen to him describe what you would be like
if you were blind, sitting in a chair, at a wake, the days short, that there might be nothing
else, night, content, unable, unwishing to recall desire, or sight.

Ardra Collins, “Not for Chopin”, in It Is Daylight