In California, sick with high blood sugar,
the composer of moonlight, waltzes, and disaster
turns in his Old World body for examination
to the doctors of sun, and the doctors of air.
With his asthma Schoenberg still gasps in the oxygen
heated by tennis courts and the commerce of sea;
the upper octaves of the outdoors hamper his breathing
as does the ostinato of ocean that falls stupidly on sand.
Later, out of the hospital, Schoenberg writes to a friend
that he is working on his new spring quartet
in which will appear all the complexity of his feelings
about male nurses, and I imagine him
seeing an entire human order overturned
and giving that line to the viola,
a long devious line about a young man dressed all in white
walking in, and staring pleasantly and having nothing to say,
who would fill his hours by shrugging and smiling
while flicking down a thermometer or depressing a tongue.
The eerie, beautiful American men
will effect the modulation from G major to A
as they hold his wrist lightly between their fingers and thumb
giving him fondly, this staring man, one of their familiar
how-are-yous
The music will be about these American children
and their evenings of honey and silk, the untorn cloth
as if there were no Laws or commandments, no Moses
to tell them never with a throbbing temple and pointing a finger.
This quartet won't be about the moon or the sun.
Schoenberg is done with the moon, the Earth's mad companion,
which speaks only German, and is instead at his desk writing
cadences about the way the male nurses walk silently
into the room; he is writing intervals about their delicate hands
and how at nightfall they bring him, the man from Vienna,
his food, the terrible bland chicken and juice,
how they appear in the dark to check on him,
these men of water and wind who have passed through the
mirror
to protect and save him—these innocents, these Americans.