Portrait of a Refugee Musician

He blinked awake, a child, a shriek
where storms owned the Gobi Desert. Wild dogs
forged at him ahead of the wind, so vicious
to rend strangers that he had to imitate them:
with his mouth he could make Chows cringe
the rest of his life. He fled so far that Mongolia
quieted back of the widest sea. He became
a composer-explorer of narrow sounds
and how they verged into packs, or receded.

In his ears he made nothing, then something,
then everything: the sun found many slow shapes
that moved under assaults of his dreams; what had not
existed began its clamor, a whole wandering
beginning that stretched out its claws and pulled
the world forward into new sound.
While his wife mediates among visitors, he
smiles and listens, calm: artist, musician.