Mozart's Requiem

That night in Prague I dreamed singing, lacrimosa,
windows open and voices

crossing paths, a chorus bearing him
even as he wanted

to stay, dying and composing
as the untongue licked him

toward oblivion and the tenors sang promisisti.

And woke to the feeling of being there and there
swept up and

plunged back. I lay still in the record heat

listening for the atmosphere to change, almost
feeling it, hundreds of miles off

but coming this way. As sometimes hearing
the music, far off

but approaching, voices thin at first,
making room

for sanctus, mouth open even if
I'm full of dread,

even if beyond Mozart's death there's
one Napoleon after another —

visionaries with their frozen dead.

There's the music and there's
the marching, Rex tremendae,

and someone paying the price, majestatis, down to
car bombs and body bags,

and now they play music in their helmets,
supplicanti,

such blessings, so much joy, the morning
after hearing his Requiem,

lux perpetua, the music that has everything
even terror, how believing

when I hear it, almost too beautiful to be
human voices, knowing it

so well I can almost sing
all parts, and want to sing,

a kind of purification, a prayer, like the story of him

still composing when he died — as if without
agony — music all over

the bed, last contractions, timpani, cellos,

his ink-stained hands.

Anne Marie Macari
Beloit Poetry Journal
Volume 56, Number 4
Summer 2006

Copyright © 2006 by The Beloit Poetry Journal
Foundation, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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