From the Archives : Mozartkugel (July 2015)

Poem originally scrawled in my pocketbook wandering the streets of Vienna, July 2015.

The same little confection you pinch like grapeshot

is depicted on the cover of the octagonal box

in your other hand, undressed of its golden foil

and bisected — its center identical to the pistachio

green of your vest — and that look on your face,

at once both blasé and pissed, betrays just how much

you resent your audience. Made for nothing more

than to tempt us with your artifice of pursed lips

inducing us to ask ourselves — How badly do I want

this for myself — to try what I’ve never tasted

as part of me — to share in the fame of the man

in my mouth — But the affront melts as we follow

the course of your smile, strained into the dimple

of your left cheek, its surface guached as though flush

with fluorescent light landing on powdered skin

pocked with eggplant and orange peel as are relics

of industrial printing. You aren’t so much Mozart

as you are the Taste of Mozart. Still, I could imagine

squeezing out of a putrid basement toilet stall

in a Ringstraße McDonalds to find you standing there

a man the same as I am, your look acknowledging

Yes, how amusing — we are as brothers in the unsavory

demands of our bodies — And then never see it again,

the face of a man who forgets mine, as well. Turning to go

would I be met with your backend, or were you simply

left blank where the pulp of your polystyrene ribbing

meets the dark of a confiserie closed on Sunday?

Or, is it you again? Another Mozart mirrored in marzipan

breeches and ruby tailcoat, foam whig and whipped

egg merengue ruffle shirt — one side determining

the outline of what’s behind it? I encounter another you

outside a gift shop in the Rotenturmstraße just when

a passing teenager slaps the candy box, causing you

to spin like a thaumatrope — sure enough, it’s you again

trapped in the outlines of him glued to your back

and as you spin the Kugel flickers both here

and here, simultaneously, the bend of your elbow

plotting the only possible place it could be

found on either side, your hand twinned to hold

these two confections in orbit, facing each other

for no one else — except your likeness on the foil

is printed looking away. So it seems not even Mozart

can be bothered by the spectacle of his singular

Mozartness — maestro of confection, Mozart of cake

and cotton candy and little chocolates that jostle

in their boxes, like the one you hold up to show us

Here — this is it — the truth of what’s inside.

A ball full of me, just for you — One of 90 million

produced at a factory on the outskirts of Salzburg

and exported to over 30 countries globally per annum

wherein a crumb of the spirit abides — a tiny Mozart

dwelling in every Kugel we will never apprehend

or conceive of the thing for which there always was

a Mozart waiting unborn in the ether for what he is

destined to be the Mozart of. As your rotation slows

and stops with the same you facing me as before

it’s like I’ve glimpsed what your vessel exists to keep

away from the world — Here in the space between

my fingers where you see the Mozart Ball, I in fact measure

the mass of your desire, the candy of your mind’s eye

in relation to all that surrounds and ultimately isn’t

this Mozart Ball right here — one might even say

that Mozart Balls precede the very demand

for Mozart Balls in that they eternally exceed it

as our souls yearn for what they’ve never tasted —

such is the misery you unseal when you bite down

that you won’t be able to stop yourself wanting more —

A few hours later and I’m annihilating a twenty-piece box

of McNuggets, watching a young woman Chaplinwalk

up and down Kärnterstraße in whig and whiteface,

her justaucorps and knickers spray-painted gold

like some porcelain fetish come to life. For dessert

I fish the Mozartkugel I’ve been saving all day

out of my tote bag, skin its finely hammered leaf

tensored squishy between index finger and thumb

that leave their prints stuck in the melted surface

muddy on my tongue, break the seal with a bite

and return my attention to the artist, now wobbling

alongside two girls in burqas who laugh as she plays

her piccolo made of air, then sneaking up behind

a teenaged couple as they go in for the kiss, tapping

the boy on the shoulder to wag her gloved finger

disapprovingly in their faces — a performance I’ve

soundtracked to Kiss my ass in B-Flat Major (KV 231)

with you part minstrel, part what we think approximates

an 18th Century fop and thus associate — whether rightly

or wrongly — with the historical man, mortal Mozart

whose placeholder you are, less you than a version of you

an actor who’s since retired played to middling acclaim

in a film based on a play where your life was recomposed

into a series of vignettes, and where the ironclad ghost

of a murdered Commendatore was mingled with the shade

of your father, his austere bicorne touched with dust.

The week following his death, you wrote a poem instead

to your dear pet starling, more recently departed —

that Lieber Narr, darling fool. It was after you’d wandered

into the pet store where you first encountered him

that you scratched in your pocketbook — 27 May 1784

Bird — Starling — 34 kreutzer — followed by notation

of the tune you taught him to sing there in his cage

maybe at the proprietor’s invitation — Ah, Herr Mozart

here’s a curiosity for you — look — this fellow without fail

will repeat any melody — go ahead, whistle something of yours

and you will find him quite the pupil — And so you did

the opening bars of the allegretto from your newest

piano concerto in G major, though he imperfectly

returned your theme, it’s true, pausing on the last beat

of the first measure and singing G sharp in the next —

or was it that he improved, improvised, gave back

your music made his own, that underneath the bars

you penciled in — How wonderful! — that Vogel Staar

(meaning both starling and stern, unyielding) knows neither

that he’s dead nor that you remained, left to mourn him

as he sings of Mozart in heaven — frees the melody

of your grace notes, embellishments — of you —

the Mozart Ball Mozart — a vibration, a ripple waning

in the wake of a man who as Mozart could not be

other than himself — so does music even exist

outside of its performance — the opera that brings

the stage to life, characters breath, their words to sing

harmonies unheard as unplayed — or do we but interfere

in your self-adequacy — perfection that knows not

how it sounds. A clamor of wings that is music played

taken off in the reading. Fingers frailly instrument the air

of halls echoing alive with voices, mimicry of birds

in true song — Only what has ceased to exist can be

abstracted — and only what is abstract shut up

to its essence — listen — you are not ball but man

brimming with gore — your ears can but hear

one note at a time after another — that’s why you fill me

with disgust — with marzipan nougat pistachio

ventriloquy — but when you unwrap this my hazelnut

body chewed to sludge and swallowed it down

I enter your blood — so trace amounts of me live

in every love handle — it’s not the music that’s mine

no — it’s your hearing, your tastebuds receiving

as if a missing piece, your mind that melts to know

completion however fleeting — finally, here I am

inside of you — The flavor goes mute, so I swallow

what’s left of the Mozart Ball, my gums coated

with buttery cud, though I can feel some of it still

lodged in the cavity between my premolars bleeding

a faint slimy twinge of sugar. Not exactly satisfying

as a dessert in itself, gone before it could barely

in the dark storefront across from where I’m sitting.

Blue oxford shirt and drawstring shorts — how equally

cartoonish this costume seems, as though belonging

to some bygone era no living person would ever

dress like anymore. I watch the man there crack open

a tallboy of Gösser — close my eyes, lean back

and take a long dram of lukewarm beer just when

suddenly I feel a tapping on my shoulder.