Poetry Review Special Feature: "Motifs" by Steven Mayoff

Songs of Eretz Poetry Review is pleased to present "Motifs" by Steven Mayoff.  A biography of Mr. Mayoff may be found here:  http://eretzsongs.blogspot.com/2014/10/poetry-review-special-feature-season-by.html.

Editor's Note:  "Motifs" offers a cool jazz mix of music and sex--lovers as instruments and instruments as lovers.  Put on some Miles Davis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMPL_ACKmHk while you read this one aloud and enjoy Mayoff's rhythmic use of alliteration and consonance and let the images emerge.  "Motifs" was first published in Epignosis Quarterly in April 2014.

Motifs

Steven Mayoff

I

Let us improvise motifs on neck

and shoulder, in the small of the back

and behind the knee, running blind fingers

over an accordion’s buttons, coaxing

a garlicky wheeze from cracked leather,

a thin current filling the spaces (minute

pockets of eternity).

II        

The real music exists between

the notes, a serpentine shimmer disturbs

the air. The clarinet’s reed stiffens

to life between saintly lips and confesses

all secret misgivings through a high black bell.

Let us practice etudes on cuticles of keys and soft

pedals, tongues strumming inner strings.

III

The bow glides across tightly-wound tendons,

a loving scrape on an open nerve.

Let us dance beneath a score of crows… ecstasy

across sky and wire and we two scarecrows, a voicing

of dry grass, hesitation and desire, pushing

the 360-degree periphery, wind-loosened borders

disturbing our air. 

Poet’s Notes:  This poem came to fruition during a poetry workshop where my instructor helped me make sense of a shapeless early draft by suggesting I break up the poem into three parts. The original title was “Musicians” and later changed to “Let Us Improvise Motifs” and now shortened to just “Motifs.”  The real music exists / between the notes… (paraphrasing Debussy) is what brings this poem home for me and inspired the more spacious line breaks. Music and seduction go hand in hand, opening the way for joy and despair, knowing the two cannot be separated.