Beethoven

i should tell you before this thing goes any further,
before you try to convince me that your cuffed shirt
and the fact that you have never cheated on any of your girlfriends
is Something,
before you start to weigh whether I would be the girl to meet your mother,
and would i be good on double dates,
before you reach across the table to start the compromise in motion,
you should know that once i sat and watched a pianist talk Beethoven to me.

"this is the whole of me, " said Beethoven.
i listened,
and in the end i could not imagine that he had written anything else
what else was there for him to say?

wait, before you place your hand on my knee, i think you should hear this.

"this is what I am," he said. "this is everything i have ever been.
this is everything I have ever been frightened of,
this is how big the world has seemed to me, when i was little, yes,
but not just when I was little,
this morning
when I stepped outside and let the mist drop on me.

"and all the terror and lust that largeness has put inside me,
this is how i began to climb it,
this is how i faced it, lungs sick with anticipation,
thin air, dizzy delirious, mad with hunger
lonely as the last man
and when i helped myself to the world, finally,
when I held it as mine, this is what it felt like for love to come over me.
this is what it was to bend her back
and be bent by love
'come and let me have all of you,' i said to the world,
and then there was no argument

"and this is how i will die, and what a painful admission that will be,
to concede to let go of her,
this world, that even I will have to let her go,
how i will have to watch her slide away from me,
that she will go on without me, how i will call after her,
this is how my voice will sound as it leaves my body,
and how i will look up, once, into the trees, squinting,
and this is how i will let her go,
this here,
finally and with all my love
and this is me placing the final word on my life,
and what a sublime act, to say
'this was me, I was, and I was this.' "

and when i heard him say all this, i knew, at that moment,
that i could never love anyone but Beethoven, not ever,
i could never do better than him, and i could never allow worse.

So. clap your mouth on mine, if you must,
but you should know now, that my heart is gone up the mountain with him.
forever.
this is the whole of me
here in this dim room,
in my heels, haloed by this hair,
draped in that soft piano music
this is me, I am, and I am this.