What is it you feel I asked Kurt when you listen to
Ravel's String Quartet in F-major, his face was so lit up
and I wondered, "the music is unlike the world I live
or think in, it's from somewhere else, unfamiliar and unknown,
not because it is relevant to the familiar and comfortable,
but because it brings me to that place that I didn't/couldn't
imagine existed. And sometimes that unfamiliar place is closer
to my world than I realize, and sometimes it's endlessly distant,"
that's what he wrote in an email when I asked him
to remind me what he'd said earlier, off the cuff, "I don't
recall exactly what I said," he began, a sentence written
in iambic pentameter, and then the rest, later he spoke of two
of his brothers who died as children, leukemia and fire,
his face, soft, I'm listening to Ravel now, its irrelevancy.


About This Poem
"This poem is part of a book-length collection of unrhymed sonnets that will in some way compose a memoir. It emerged from one conversation among many I had with the composer Kurt Rohde while we were in residency together. The poem started with a question that grew from a deep curiosity and developed into an even deeper connection."
-Diane Seuss

About Diane Seuss
Diane Seuss is the author of "Four-Legged Girl" (Graywolf Press, 2015). She teaches at Kalamazoo College and lives in Kalamazoo, Mich.

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The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2016 Diane Seuss. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate