To Music, from an Old Lover

My dear,

I sometimes thought I’d die without you—you who shook my soul and filled the wasteland of my womb with fertile singing. Yet I left you fully conscious of the risk of slow and agonizing death, or of an ever-bleeding wound where ancient ecstasies had hymned and sighed. I knew I could expect the wrenching of my heart whenever I perceive you suffering beneath the unrefined or disrespectful treatment you so often have to bear. I suffer with you, as a faithful lover should, regretting the predicament in which I placed myself and you. Perhaps, though, I presume too much—you have survived for centuries without me; and although I feel as if I’ve loved you since you first began to use your charms to soothe the savage breast of man, you owe me nothing. Rather, it is I who owe my very life to you. Although I chose to leave you, you could never part from me. You are the organ of my thought, the beat that pulses through my veins, the breath that feeds my being until death—and I remain, at heart,

                                                                                     Forever yours

I had originally written this poem, four years ago, in strict iambic tetrameter, which on paper made it look long and narrow, with very short lines, not at all like a letter. I decided to reconfigure it, preserving the iambs, but converting it into a prose poem so that it looks and feels more like a real letter. 

© Leticia Austria 2012