O’clock, a poem by David Garyan

Valentina Ventura

2019

Teatro Eschilo, Gela

O’clock

Old math professors, and perhaps even their students— those whose minds have yet to harden from either scientific triumphs or failures in life— will say a musician’s heart isn’t a metronome you can follow to learn the tempo of love, and would their logic really be wrong? But why is age so convinced, while youth may hesitate to agree? Is it not certainty— hanging like a noose around the neck of an innocent person— that’s eager to judge the one whose language it has no interest in learning? For there are no numbers, or even equations which equal them, that have ever doubted what they are, even when they certainly doubt them, but four fingers moving on a fretboard can be both precise and make mistakes in the same moment— like writers who send perfectly addressed letters to the wrong people, or artists who paint exact portraits of people they hate, never hiding their flaws or sharpening their beauty. And who can claim not to have been that artist or writer at least once in their lives? Indeed, do we not rest like the most faithful watches— either on the arms or in the pockets of those who always want our time, but never bother to look where we came from, or where it is we want to go?