Indeterminacy

How many times I tried to record the Goldberg Variations
Once in Iceland another time in California
It was Mercury in retrograde I didn’t get the chords right
You see I wanted a different kind of music
One that felt like a foreign city or ice cracking
A prediction of snow and then the snow itself endless
I wanted the blue stripes on your shirt the paleness of your underarm
The whiteout of a spring blizzard, everything unexpected
See I didn’t do well with indeterminacy—the blank sides of a dice
The piano chord I recognized but couldn’t name
A different kind of intimacy because I was tired of being unsurprised
Behind me in the photo the black river unraveled
Like a list of the dead children or the ones I never had
The field split open like a lip
I asked the river for answers but heard nothing
The path was obscured by another person’s tracks in the snow
Snow falling so slowly that no one noticed it.

Copyright © 2024 by J. Mae Barzio. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 23, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“I was reading the diaries of John Cage, imagining that desire was shaped by an indeterminacy of performance. Cage used chance operations to shape his creations, abandoning the idea that the artist has total control. The poem allowed me to waver. I remembered the Northern landscapes and sonatas of my childhood, the performance of grief and desire moving through infinite variations.”
—J. Mae Barizo