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 infrared 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,
and the inescapable, neverending condition
                  of music,
cruel genius laughing
         and calling the tunes.