Music in Motion

Poems that play while they walk

Maybe it went for a walk by itself? Photo by Janderson Tulio on Unsplash

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You hear the classical-radio host throw out a fact in passing as she introduces another concerto. A sentence catches your eye in one of Austin Kleon’s books. Next thing you know you’re writing a note to an 18th-century genius, or watching two other mismatched geniuses stroll down the street together.

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ON LEARNING THAT MOZART NEVER COMPOSED FOR THE CELLO         2025


Oh, Wolfi, how it might have changed you. I can hear
you laughing, mocking all those slow, low, boring moans
of podgy strings, but what if you had tuned yourself
to that deep voice, and listened? What could you have heard
without the drive to gallop scores of brilliant notes,
frantic, through every measure? If your pulse and breath
had deepened too, if you had let your urgent genius
rest for once, relax the tempo? What you might
have added — to your music, to your living days —
if you had stilled enough to hear that deep voice sing.

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LOUIE AND BOB                                                                                                    2026


“Both Ludwig van Beethoven and Bob Dylan got picked up by the police while wandering in the suburbs — Beethoven in nineteenth-century Vienna, Dylan in twenty-first-century New Jersey.”  — Austin Kleon, in "Keep Going"


And now I see them shambling side by side
down tidy, startled streets, all unaware
of blinds and curtains twitching as they pass.
They do not talk; no need, when each is rapt
conversing with the music in his head —
lean, long-fingered hands in constant motion
as one works out a riff on air-guitar
and one coaxes a slow crescendo from
an orchestra that only he can hear.
The cruiser, slowing, scans their untamed hair
and shabby shoes, the siren blurts a warning;
one never turns, one drops his air guitar
and lifts a lean hand, longest finger skyward,
then finds his riff again. What happens next
depends on judgment, mercy, and which music
some cop heard on their parents’ stereo,
which brooding face they saw on album covers,
which concerts play, live, in their memories.

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