Please Marry Me

We are stretched out on a dingy sofa, and I think

I must be barefoot because a woman whom no one knows

Is massaging the ankle of one leg of mine and the instep

Of the other, all this toward morning, and I have that

Occasional epiphany one has while still asleep

That I am floating down a river

Because I am so happy and all the dismal issues

Have been made tractable at last, and so I say to her

That the late symphonies of Gustav Mahler

Are more lucid if you’re sitting close to, and above,

The orchestra, so that you can see the contrapuntal

Lines moving from strings to woodwinds

And then back again, whereupon this woman,

Sitting (I now realize) at my feet, says, in the full

Heat of our dream life, and in that happiness,

“Please marry me. Your mother likes me,”

And so I wake, not laughing, although my mother

Has been dead for over thirty years, but in wonderment

Over what quality this dream-woman must have owned

To have pleased my mother so that she,

My late mother, would have said, despite her ban

On ordinary pleasantries, that she had liked someone,

Anyone, who might have cared for me, and as I lie

In bed I think of the last movement of Mahler’s Ninth

When the melodic lines go quiet for minute after minute

In a prolonged farewell to music and to life,

Which my mother would attend to in her bathrobe

Late at night, the stereo turned up, blended whiskey

In her highball glass mixed with milk as a disguise,

Leaning back, hand over eyes, silent-movie style

Like Norma Desmond listening as Von Stroheim plays

The organ wearing his white gloves. No, it wasn’t

Mahler, it was Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht,

Moon-drunk music, mad and inconsolable.