Music is hard to write about because it vanishes as it is made, and "After Tord Gustavsen" begins by admitting that difficulty. The title points to the Norwegian jazz pianist, and "after" in a poem's title usually signals a response rather than a description. The poem never names a tune or an album, so it is not trying to report on a performance. It tries to rebuild the feeling of listening out of other senses: touch, sight, and the sense of standing inside a space.
The opening sets the terms. "As with etching melodies an / echo travels inward." Etching is a visual, physical craft in which acid or a blade cuts into metal. Applying it to melody suggests that sound leaves a mark on the listener. The direction matters too. The echo travels *inward*, not out into a room, so the poem's real setting is the mind of the person listening. The odd detached "'s" in "inward 's astute / listening" reinforces this. The grammar slips slightly, as if the poem were too absorbed to tidy itself, and the possessive suggests that the inward self has its own attentiveness.
The middle of the poem turns music into material. The "orchestra of / cymbals' breath" is a lovely phrase. Cymbals don't breathe, but a soft brush or a shimmer after a strike can seem like exhaling, and "breath" makes the percussion sound human and quiet. Then comes "elongated structural dynamic," which sounds like a music-theory textbook crossed with an architect's report. Sound is being treated as something with a frame. The word "this" then gets a line to itself, like a finger pointing at something just heard, and the poem names what it is pointing at: "workable softness." The phrase is slightly paradoxical. Softness is usually what we can't grip, yet here it is something that can be shaped, as if the musicians were working clay.
The sense of touch takes over in the next lines: a "shadowy filter" that "stays / across silken skin." Whether the skin belongs to a listener, an instrument, or the music itself is left open, and that openness suits the subject. The sibilance of "silken skin," "softness," "shadowy," and "stays" runs through the poem like brushes on a snare, so the sound of the words supports what they describe. Then the mood shifts. "Dust across the dancing diligence" brings in something stale and settled alongside something lively, and "diligence" is an unexpected word for dancing. It frames movement as patient labor, which fits the careful, unhurried quality the rest of the poem suggests.
The ending moves from the body to a building. The phrase "there, stilled, breaking / from abridged variants of light, half-lit / dimension of a hall's skeletal encasing" places us in what reads as a concert hall, though the poem never says so. Light is "abridged," shortened like a text, and offered in "variants," a word that also belongs to music, where themes return in altered forms. The hall has a "skeletal encasing," a structure of bones around the sound. The poem ends on a noun and a fading image rather than a conclusion, so it finishes the way a quiet note dies away, with no final chord.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter. It runs as a single unpunctuated sentence, with no capital letters and no full stop, apart from a few commas near the end. Lines break on small, weak words ("an," "with," "of," "and"), so the reader keeps leaning forward into the next line, much like a held note that hasn't resolved. The pace is slow, and the rhythm comes from these hesitations and from the long, Latinate words ("elongated," "structural," "abridged") set against short, plain ones ("dust," "light," "breath").
What makes the poem interesting is that it refuses the easy way of writing about music, which is to say it was "beautiful" or "moving." It tries instead to give the reader the experience of attention, in which the senses blur and sound becomes skin, light and architecture. It is a demanding poem, since the grammar is loose and the images don't settle into one story. But that difficulty is part of the point. Like quiet music, it rewards being read slowly, with the ear tuned inward.