Heather Taylor Johnson
An Introduction to Liberal Arts
I learned about mathematics-in-music at university.
Somewhere between binge drinking and finding my soul,
I discovered the inevitable:
inspiration doesn't become creation without fine tuning.
Take Five wasn't a stroll down an alley
of garbage cans and scurvy cats, the woman in red,
a hobo whistling, that man in a suit with an alto sax.
It was perfect numbers from fractions
with order and reason
and from it came rhythm and song.
I bought a Dave Brubeck CD and listened while I studied,
while I strove to write poems without counting syllables,
while I ate two minute noodles and drank six packs of beer,
while I tried to sleep as my roommate fucked a coed from the first
floor
in time to beats of jazzed up fives.
I memorised melodies and had to do equations
and questioned my vocation as would-be poet
because I wanted to be that woman in red,
that very saxophone played by the pin-striped suited man
and I wanted to believe that magic lies within the muse
and the artist and the sound and the word and the pen
and algebra was as dead as high school lockers during summertime
days.
I wanted to heed the creed of art for art's sake.
I was eighteen.
I failed Music Theory, ascended to drinking bourbon
and cokes
and lost my virginity all in a year.
That boy dumped me in two weeks time
while the bourbon turned to cheap red wine
and I wrote poems on life-til-now
while others took notes on why painting is like geometry.
What Was and Is and Shall Not Be
There were other days
when like some flourescent kite
pink from sun and yellowed hair
I swayed with rushes
and lost my stomach
and laughed and ran,
threw sand with my toes
and swam until I seeped out salt.
And there was a man,
who built with me dreams of densely watered dirt
and sat beside me, sharing stories from shells
and we held the world between the hairs of our skin
that smelled of sweet coconut sweat.
This place was a watercoloured picture book.
This place was fish and chips.
But I was younger, knew what to do with what I had,
I knew the taste of a sunscreened man,
knew how to take off my clothes,
run til I fell
and splash and dive
and swim.
Ten years later
this place is darker
and I could mean the clouds
or the overall feel
because there's something about
metal cranes and concrete stacks
in the distance of my ocean
or the beach that's not sand
but boulders the size of my weakened back
when it's slouched in gloomy defeat.
This place is starving seagulls.
I could just be brooding
because my spectrum of sky is grey to dark grey,
because I'm older and I get this way,
alone and extinguished,
cold and alone.
This place is for sinking stones
as small as these tied to each finger and toe
or those that dangle from both my ears
or as large as the one that hangs from my neck
or the one that cuts my wrists.
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