08/22/08
Today in 1862
Claude Debussy was born.
I remember where I was and what I was doing
one hundred years and two months later:
elementary algebra, trombone practice,
Julius Caesar on the record player
with Brando as Antony, simple
buttonhook patterns in football,
the French subjunctive, and the use
of "quarantine" rather than "blockade"
during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It was considered the less belligerent word.
Much was made of it in 1962,
centenary of Debussy’s birth.
And if today I play his Rhapsody
for Saxophone and Orchestra
for the ten minutes it requires of
my undivided attention, who will attack me for
living in Paris in 1908 instead of now?
Let them. I'll take my stand,
my music stand, with the composer
of my favorite Danse Tarantelle.
Copyright © 2013 by David Lehman. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on August 22, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
"I wrote the first draft of this poem in 2008, on Claude Debussy’s birthday, August 22. Thus the title's numerical symmetry: '08/22/08.' The logic of mathematics suggested the leap from 1862, the year of Debussy’s birth, to his centenary year of 1962, then back to the present and forth to 1908—the present minus 100 years—with Debussy at work on his saxophone rhapsody. Time, then, is the subject. But time plus numbers are two thirds of the way to music, and Debussy’s music gets the last word, as it should."
—David Lehman
David Lehman
David Lehman is the author of several collections of poems and books of criticism and is also known as a prominent editor, teacher, and literary critic.