Berlioz and Saint-Saens

you don't know what romantic is until
you're sequestered in the first class cabin
of an old Boeing 747 blasting off
from Haneda across the Pacific with
a 90-piece orchestra and a massed choir
of thousands. the engines thrum beneath you
and before you the light of ten thousand suns,
pagan brass defiling the Te Deum and the organ
these Napoleonic Frenchmen aspiring to be Wagner

or at 19 writing your masterpiece at midnight in the
East Asian Library with the glittering magnificence of
Manhattan all around you and within you, just a little
Sturm und Drang. you go to the Met to hear
Les Souffrances du jeune Werther and while the Met
bedazzles you Massenet's passion is not that of Goethe's.
casting around for a hopeless woman to obsess over
and finding none you return to the library reflecting that if
you're going to blow your brains out it will take more than
a silly French opera to make you do it