Quartet
It all comes down
****to a glass of water:
****full, clear, lustrous
****on the teacher’s desk
****
It’s late afternoon
The teacher’s misplaced his chalk
****
It all comes down, he says,
****to four reasonable people
****arguing in a small room
****
To what he as a ten-year-old
****witnessed at a railway station
****near Munich
****at war’s end: the charred lump
****
****of what had been a baby, fallen
****from its mother’s suitcase
****onto the planks
****
The whole city fleeing itself
****
From the sky: the screams of violins
****
It all comes down, finally,
****to three black suits
****and one red skirt
****on a brightly lit stage
****
To B♭, B, E♭, E
****
To how each thing returns, despite
****itself, in slightly altered form.
Gary Duehr is based in Boston and teaches writing for local universities. His MFA is from the Iowa Writers Workshop. He has received an NEA Poetry Fellowship, as well as grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the LEF Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Journals in which his writing has appeared include Agni, American Literary Review, Chiron Review, Cottonwood, Hawaii Review, Hotel Amerika, Iowa Review, and North American Review. His books include Point Blank (In Case of Emergency Press), Winter Light (Four Way Books) and Where Everyone Is Going To (St. Andrews College Press).