Peter Weltner’s After, with images by Gerald Coble, is the last of four remarkable books of poetry in the series.
AFTER Peter Weltner, poems Gerald Coble, images
Reverberations
As you chatted with friends in the Piazza San Marco
watching tourists while you sipped an espresso,
you heard far off an amateur trio–violin,
clarinet, accordion–performing an Italian serenade
to a small crowd even though, much closer, within
the Basilica, Stravinsky’s Canticum was being played.
Just last month, you wrote to me how you could hear
most clearly in that moment its composer’s mastery,
his ability to determine from knowing San Marco’s architecture
how long to make the delay he scored between movements
last so that the music’s reverberations would be sure
to sound throughout its vast spaces and off walls exactly
for the required duration, composing the silence, how it augments
what is sounded before and after it, the way a painting, you’d showed
me six decades earlier, was less what one saw and more what it pointed to.
MARROWSTONE PRESS