The Art of Composition — Blackbird Archive

← v16n2, Fall 2017

The man across from me on the plane

is depositing notes one by one on or under the lines, tails pointing up,

or down. His earbuds are letting him know if the moves are right.

From the left margin, he seems to be dragging forth emblems

for certain instruments. No one is hearing

but him. He is a large man, sunglasses shoved to the top of his shaved head

as if he has been recently encouraged out of the dark—

a great whale, drawn by the secret ringing

of the depths.

There is so much I do not know.

There is the word spiritual, which seems like a greeting from a distance,

some reverberation where desire and conviction meet.

I am forever watching things make themselves up out of stuff

I can’t even hear.

And beauty, every time I lean close enough, there is the vertigo.

But now I see he is sending a horizontal line

across what he has made, sweeping measure by measure

over the evidence he has placed on his screen.

The Art of Composition

music art solitude spirituality

Fleda Brown

Fleda Brown is the author of the poetry collection The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems (2017), which was chosen for the University of Nebraska poetry series 2017, and a memoir, Driving With Dvorak (2010), both of which were published by the University of Nebraska Press. She has nine previous collections of poems. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award. Brown has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series and was Poet Laureate of Delaware from 2001–2007. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware and on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop.