What if, as children, Debussy and Rimbaud spoke? It’s possible…then, After That Day….

After That Day

Achille-Claude Debussy is my favorite composer and Arthur Rimbaud is my favorite poet. There is another connection between these two artistic visionaries besides being my faves…

The former home of Debussy’s piano teacher, who was Paul Verlaine’s mother-in-law, where Rimbaud was a guest and Debussy took piano lessons.

When they were children, Debussy and Rimbaud were guests at the same time in the same home in Paris—that of Debussy’s piano teacher and her husband. Also living in the home was their daughter, Mathilde, and Mathilde’s husband, poet Paul Verlaine.

My poem is an imagined interaction that explores the question of what if…

What if, as children, Debussy and Rimbaud spoke?

After That Day

Her house was hers.

Her piano was mine. Every piano was mine.

After that day.

3 November 1871:

“Again, my protégé. Practice your Chopin

I must attend to my daughter and her baby,”

My teacher says, as she lifts her blue-silked self

Softly from the stool of the piano.

Again, Mathilde and the newborn are crying.

Again, I am in my teacher’s home, as I am most hours of most days now,

Studying piano. My father in prison, my mother stretching pennies

To cover our basic needs, we have no piano

In my home. My piano is here. In her home.

The home of my teacher, Mme. Mauté de Fleurville.

My fingers dutifully follow the genius of Chopin.

A child, I’m invisible here, even during lessons.

I sense someone in the hallway.

I know I should ignore the presence.

I should continue my drill. But

I stop. I look.

A boy.

I’ve seen him many times before,

This guest in my teacher’s home

Since sometime in September,

But me, a fixture at the piano,

Playing Chopin, always Chopin,

Too busy playing to play;

He and I have yet to speak. Though

Once, when I approached the home,

He lay on his back on the rock path.

The stone path in front of the home, where Rimbaud reportedly lay on his back to view the sky.

As I walked past him

He propped himself

On his elbows,

Smoking a pipe

Lost in the sky,

I said hello.

He didn’t reply.

Today, I say

Again

“Hello.”

“And to you,” he answers. “Nice tune.”

“Chopin,” I say.

“You’re exceptionally talented,” he says.

His eyes smile like a grandfather’s.

“I am nine years old. My teacher says I am a gifted child,” I answer.

“There are no children in France,” he says. Then

Turning to the window, intently

Watching Mathilde’s husband

Saunter with cane down Montmartre into Paris

He adds,

“Except for those who think they are not.”

Though his confidence exudes age,

His appearance suggests 14, 15 maybe.

“You are not a child?” I ask.

“Only in the sense that I am a true poet.

A seer. A visionary,” he says.

“I was invited here

For that reason. For my verse. By your teacher’s son-in-law,

Paul,

France’s greatest poet, besides Baudelaire, and

Me.

Paul and I write together now. He’s learning

What poetry should be.”

Then he looks at me:

“And that is the only way you should be a child.

Become a visionary.”

“A visionary,” I state, thoughtful. Then,

“How does one become a visionary?” I ask.

He says, “Hear music with

All of your senses. But first know this:

Music hears you.

The instrument doesn’t make music;

Music makes the instrument.”

I nod.

He smiles, then adds, “Become a visionary

By staying in the child’s beliefs;

By staying outside reality.

By disordering the senses.”

Interesting, I’m thinking. I ask,

“What does disordering the senses mean?”

Eyes closed, he tilts his head upward for a moment,

Then opens his eyes and focuses on me, saying:

“Never stop living in wonder.

A child’s cosmos is one of wonder.

Wonder

Is beyond the borders of reality.

Our eyes hold us back from what we can hear to be

The truth of beauty.

Imagine

If you could see with your ears.”

I close my eyes and I listen.

The room settles, quiet as an obedient lion,

Except for the baby, upstairs, whimpering.

Or is that Mathilde?

I tune out the whimpering.

He asks, “What colors

Do you see with your ears?”

Instantly I say,

“Last birds chirping for food and last leaves falling

Sound like purple and yellow. And, I feel the chill, and

That is blue.”

“Ah, yes,” he says.

“Now, look at something,

Then hear it.”

I open my eyes and I study my fingers at the piano keys.

I say, “To me

The image of my keyboard sounds like joy with a thorn,

A lilting tone with an ache. And with comfort.”

“Play it,” he says.

I do.

With my right hand, I play the G Flat

Major scale, sounding flats simultaneously

On one octave, then on another, ending with my

Caress of the soothing key of B

Softly, five times.

“Pure poetry of the modern,” he says.

“Now,

Listen with your nose.”

He and I laugh.

“Remember, the child knows all,” he says. He looks at my

Porcelain frog from my father’s shop

Sitting on the piano and says, “What does that guy hear?”

We laugh again.

“You are funny,” I say, then I ask,

“What is your name?”

“Arthur. And you?”

“Achille.”

Arthur turns back to the window, opens it, and stretches

His neck forward and up, breathing deeply,

Jutting his face with eyes closed

As far upward

As he can.

“Arthur, what are you doing?” I ask.

“Pressing my imagination into the sky. Breathing sound.”

And then,

Face still projecting outside the frame, he says:

Pebbles press my body

As I am buried alive,

Inhaling our planet.

A vagabond of phantasmagoria, I

Meander the earth throwing charity

As a bridegroom who stole his bride’s bouquet

Of glass flowers, shattering at his touch,

Broken petals—

A showering ceremony.

As I reach for their fall,

I snatch the sharp-edged pieces into my hands

To press them to repair,

Craft them into joy, but

My fingers bleed

From your Music

Fresher than each

Drop of dew, like tears—

Prisms free my kaleidoscope

Vision

Dancing in your

Sun-soaked dawns.

My teacher enters, holding the baby;

Upon seeing Arthur, her face reddens.

Her voice steady, she says, “Didn’t Paul tell you

To leave? You’ve been 17 for two weeks. You can

Find work. Or go back to Charleville. Doesn’t matter

To us what happens to you. Just

Get out. Get out of our

Happy home. Now.”

Arthur smiles at me, winks and says,

“Free the mystery—and the vision—you hold inside you.”

He walks over the threshold, leaving the door open.

He doesn’t look back.

My teacher closes the door,

Then, while pressing the baby’s cheek to her cheek, she says,

Stomping her foot to each word,

“Again, Achille, Chopin. Continue. Again. Again. Again.”

Months pass,

As I train in the happy home

Filled with screaming and crying, more

From the baby’s mother than the baby.

Mathilde’s husband left long ago—gone,

Traveling with Arthur.

Crying never ceases.

22 August 1872. My tenth birthday:

I am perfecting

My Chopin

As I listen with all my senses.

Mathilde begins screaming.

She enters the room, calling to her mother.

With both hands, I grasp my porcelain frog.

Mathilde waves pages with exact handwriting on them.

“Under floorboards. I found letters, love letters, to Paul

From that wretched Rimbaud!

And, this poem! The Spiritual Hunt! Doesn’t even sound like a poem!”

My teacher takes the pages from Mathilde, and reads:

Riding the rails I travel

The valleys of my life,

Viewing the original of all bones in this

Supposedly inanimate rock fortress—

The Earth’s corpus.

Pieces of light footfalls

Single-armed shards escape!

Flights to golden cities

Disguised as Hell.

Poetry waves its pages

As flags of victory.

Ghosts grip me as sure as the

Bridegroom’s modern fist,

A magician’s turn of hand

Conjuring ritual chanting dissolves

Into deserts, captured now in glass

Globes, curved cases measuring time in

Falling pieces, time for those who deserve

So much less. No one knows love

Especially not the children.

Need for the corporeal saying this is the soul

Tips the scale as gold bricks—

A poor kindness—

Pour kindness on the other plate of the scale. Watch!

Twins Charity and Grace embrace me, their tears

Drench my cheeks, an honest baptism.

Enough!

Clouds melt into trees melt into fresh meadows,

Grasses reach, tickle our chins,

Until we smile,

Until we laugh,

Until we fall together into hidden heights.

And the spiritual beast

Alludes my best efforts of pursuit.

A forlorn chase

That merely quickens

As my own quickening.

I am silent.

My teacher is silent.

Mathilde grabs the pages from her mother.

The sound of poetry ripping shakes the room,

Quakes the quiet.

My teacher lets her daughter destroy

Visionary art.

Beauty is in pieces now. Mathilde throws Art in the hearth,

And

With her lucifer stick

Sets love aflame.

Fire! Fire! Fire!

The Spiritual Hunt, ignited.

Holding tight my childhood friend, I watch

Revolutionary lyrics transmute

Into air, I breath the smoke, cough.

It’s my turn.

I cry.

Intuitive tears wake me beyond my senses

And devastation fills every space, inflaming me

For one purpose—the creation of auditory vision

Dancing in sun-soaked dawns;

Heart breaking doors open to the child,

And my own quickening.

Never again will I obey

Someone else’s music. I watch the fire, and

I burn all the old songs with my mind.