I'm waking
in the morning of the National Day 2021,
breathing the air
like any animal,
thinking about Stockhausen
on the day he got the Polar Prize in 2001,
always out of place
with the Stockhausen Syndrom,
bent on his next idea,
remote in his scores,
practical in his methods,
slightly amused
with his disciples' candid reverence,
playing the game,
but revealing the furious little three-year-old,
screaming, red in his face, stomping his feet
in senseless, motherless frustration
when some machinery malfunctioned,
or a poor seminar attender arrived a minute late...
but soon regaining his stature
and the myth of a wise old man,
only to drop dead
in the wee hours of a day in 2007,
in the shame of not being allowed completion
of the Twenty-Four Hours of the Day;
the purist, the pedant
having to leave it all hanging in the air,
as life always cuts in,
be it with death,
always cuts in

and I hear the pigeon
through my open summer window,
repeating its message,
pausing in the middle of a sentence,
the moment slipping across the threshold;
an entire world moving on
in its earthly inertia

You arrive from the mountains
with sore feet
You arrive from yourself
with less identity,
with somewhere dissolved
into the nowhere;
with sometime falling
between never and always

I asked Stockhausen out for a beer
in Donaueschingen in 2004,
but he felt he had to be with his grand kids

His beautiful handwriting danced
before my eyes
for the last time
three weeks before his demise

My memories of him are ambivalent