Michelle: Counterpoint

You asked me to write
the lyrics to your life
not realizing that
like every failed songwriter before me

I'd never be able to put the words to your music
in such a way as to ever please you
the severest of your critics
and the most fickle of all the audiences
for which you will ever perform.

It is for these same two tonalities
that I remember and record you here.

Classical by day
you arrange files, lists, gigs and friends
with the air of a conductor
orchestrating time and space
according to some secret, inner score
your will an impatient baton.

But by night
and at other nocturnal moments
that find you improvising selves
and shedding scales
you become jazz.

It's as if your being's own rhythm
had been syncopated in mid-bar.

Like a note
the instant before it is heard
you vibrate unformed
between Sebastian Bach and Eubie Blake
until, at the speed of sound

you appear
with a clamorous change of
hair or eye colour
instrument or career

playing all the while
rifts of sweet sensation
for lovers who listen
as if their very
heartbeats had been synchronized to
your new kind of fusion
your determined off-beat.