Alicia Hoffman

Sempre Forte

“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible." —Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, from A Treasure of Polish Aphorisms, translation from the Polish by Jacek Galazka.

I don’t know why Debussy said music is the silence
between the notes, but I do know the hushed hum

of an aftermath. Listen: between each fall a timbre
as it swoops to rise, giving way to pitch and harmony.

It’s the oboe’s reed, the mouthpiece beginning to glisten.
Fact is, I am far more insignificant than a snowflake,

unable to enact a crescendo on the smallest instrument
in the orchestra. So I plan to love it all, place no blame

or responsibility on each cell dividing, each microbe insisting.
My plan is to clash like a cymbal’s clang into the landscape.

To look the ruin in its face in order to know it better. Take
Vesuvius, before and after. Or the character actor’s slow gesture

in a Victorian tableau. As if the avalanche were anything other
than a natural fortissimo. A great sweep into some other shape,

with no regard for turpitude or distemper, duty or honor. As if
a crashing can ever be weighed by the brain’s dull architecture.

As if a single crystal can hold a moral code, as it transmogrifies
itself from gas to solid to liquid, as it slides itself into this blank

canvas. This white field. Fleck of notation on the sheet of a score.

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Originally from Pennsylvania, Alicia Hoffman now lives, writes and teaches in Rochester, New York. Author of two collections, her poems have appeared in a variety of journals, including Radar Poetry, A-Minor Magazine, The Penn Review, Softblow, The Watershed Review, Rust + Moth, Glass: A Poetry Journal and elsewhere. Find her at: www.aliciamariehoffman.com.