“There is no music in The Firebird” – Sergei Prokofiev

“Prokofiev is wasting time with ballets” – Igor Stravinsky

Tonight the prompt was placed beside
my leather journal—random, my wife’s choice.
I noted it, then set it down, applied
no pressure to respond, no inward voice.
I am indifferent to cherries still,
and equally to prompts, their formal stress;
they sit, requiring nothing of my will,
their presence more a fact than an address.
Stravinsky said constraints would set us free,
to serve precision, nothing more and nothing less.
But then, he never answered to the plea
of three fixed cherries—though he did confess
a lasting spell from Petrushka’s chorded air.
By morning, three orange vitamins were there.