Reflections of a Muse
(for Alisa Weilerstein,
after Dvorak's Cello Concerto)

I mourn the past for what a muse has seen.
Imagine horses, carts, and cobblestone.
Within a timeless masque, I walk dead streets
Among the lonely charms a cello knows.
I pace the margins of a written youth,
Inscribing isolation from lost shores.
In a composer's life, loss calms the muse:
My nadir sighs and sleeps a latent score.
Count years, then rouse his fervent lines of age,
Stir silent charms that hold my past in chains.
Count years, then liberate me from his page,
And heat the strings that forge incarnate pain.
I drew first breath in a composer's score,
Now pain must live that I may breathe once more.