Obliged Genius

// Rosemary Moeller

Curtis didn’t displace much water
swimming in the feedlot water tanks in summer,
the smallest, blondest, thinnest of the cousins.
A score of years later
he didn’t displace much air on stage at first,
but he sat at the piano, adjusted the bench,
dressed like a modern day Franz Liszt,
filled every cubic inch with the sounds
that required those hands of his that stretched
over eleven keys gracefully, firmly.
His obsession to be Liszt, body and mind,
was focused in those hands,
possessed by the obliged genius,
expressing the pains, rejections of love,
embracing narcissism
for lack of understanding by anyone else.
This performer filled the body silently
animated the love musically
climaxed in technical complexities
and left spaces echoing with
vibrations of string and sinew continuing outward.