Listening to Rachmaninov

  by Phillip Peters

I sit in the back of the mezzanine,
listening to Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto. 
I close my eyes and it takes me in its arms, 
its lips play with my ear’s lobe; I hear the
battle between orchestra and piano,
between depression and a drunken conductor.
He died in1943 during the war, not in Russia old and alone,
but on a Beverly Hills new spring day so far from Russia
he couldn’t taste the cold or smell the war.

In the cello section there’s a woman in black---
but all the women are in black;
many women have much to mourn.
Between her legs she strokes her instrument, 
mellow music flows, mixing with waves 
from other instruments like currents in a river,
around boulders, over rocks, music flowing down to the sea.

Musicians in orange life preservers float down a river,
woodwinds in one raft, strings in another,
sopping wet after box car rapids, brass drinking beer 
in the back of a pickup running down river road
percussionists waiting in the park at the end
of the first movement, in the shade and tranquility 
next to Maupin’s glassy waters, where the river slides slowly
with the concerto in tow.

Chords grow in harmonic tension, the strings hover above the piano
taking flight like songbirds over the river, as the second movement
finds it way through rapids and pools above the final movement
below valley walls echoing in counterpoint.
The river, the music condense at the squeeze, 
the narrow finale of unrunable white water
and end in a burst of watery energy. The music slows, accelerates,
sends rhythmic ripples running across the river flowing to its mouth. 
Its music rises to meet the end, bursting like fireworks 
high above the stage as the last note echoes, 
applause flowing down.  Musicians put away their instruments
fall into the silence of night, shoes, wet with river water.