Yareah Magazine

Joseph Mailander

Adagio in F-Major in a B-flat Major Opus, 67

This shameless key
which lives its musical life
fully, nonsensically has
one flat, B-flat, which is
how you sign it, and

you find sometime
you get what you
need with F-Major: in Beethoven's
Pastoral, (but the thunder
claps in F-minor); and Brahms's
Third, which is all about
middle-aged
love and its arms-length
complexities, but also is very
Frei aber Froh (a musical pun: F
a-b F!); but for

this peculiar adagio,
this second movement of
this third string quartet of
Brahms, Op. 67, it sings
well before 1969, when

I was a free but happy child and
you were a free but happy child in
a childhood kingdom
by the nonesuch sea
before dipping a foot
in a postulant grave

and your favorite flavor was
cherry red and

and yes, Hey Jude also
is in F-Major too, na na na na

Ecclesiastes 3:4

Of all the books in the Tanakh, Ecclesiastes is the one I've contemplated more than any other. Yet when I have read Ecclesiastes 3 before, I've read it as though the times for living, dying, mourning, laughing, weeping, dancing, and all the other things we do as humans were long, slowing unfolding parts of life, with long transitions, and copious stretches of time for, indeed, every thing.

Yesterday I understood a little differently: there are times for mourning, weeping, laughing, dancing; there are times to sow, to reap; for love, hate, war, peace---all within a single day.

Maybe it was also like this in the time of Solomon and Homer; but certainly our experiences are more compressed now. It's contemporary life, with its mobility and gadgets and impatience, that has enabled us to connect all these emotions within shorter and shorter times, to pile them on top of each other, to drive from a cemetary to a dance hall, or from a health food store to outpatient oncology, or to laugh while there's war, or to be angry one moment and love the next. Even our ordinary days are full of extraordinary differences. Enjambment is a defining quality of contemporary life.

POND

You turtle, you
have nothing
to do
but
float.

At peace
drift from
shade to shade
pad to pad

finding food

The dragons fly
like spies.
They threaten--

we watch
as though
we were
at home.

--JM, San Marino, July 1980

BIOGRAPHY
	http://mainbrace.blogspot.com Joseph Mailander A Los Angeles native and lifelong resident, Joseph Mailander writes op-eds, cultural criticism, fiction, and poetry. He attended Columbia and UCLA, studying Art History, English, and American History. He contributes to many electronic and print media publications, and also has edited several blogs, including mainbrace, street-hassle, and LA Opus.