Snowblind: Threnody for Glenn Gould and Thelonious Monk

The keyboard is an abstract landscape
white, cold, brittle
ivory porcelain
sheen,
black keys
for color
and relief.
A mind could come unglued
there,
marooned in the mindblinding aural
spectrum
as if chromatics
were an infared map
of the other world.
Brilliance, the mind creating its own weather,
its own regions
for exploration,
polarities of timbre
and distemper,
whiteouts beyond reason
and too bright
to survive.
This weather ranging across the skies of the mind
into music,
weather from which there is no
shelter,
only storms, complications,
cruel genius
laughing
and calling the tunes.

Anthony Walton
Snowblind first appeared in The Kenyon Review, Winter 1999.