The Otherworldly

Man, it tastes good, down there at the bottom.
The later verses turn their audience
Into exegetes, into exegete.
"You get the feeling Beethoven believed
He was writing a market-pleasing thing
Then found the project growing more tangled.
Or perhaps he meant all along to veer,"
Wrote a magazine critic. "What I shit
Is better than anything you've ever
Thought," the self-same critic quotes Beethoven,

As evidence "Beethoven himself took
Some pride in the work." He couldn't hear it.
He can't hear it still. But the last verses,
So desperate and so close to the brink
Foolishly they endeavored to describe,
Are done. The sun slips away from the stones
As they, ineluctably, slip away
From their temporary lord and master,
The self-same sun that never heard music,
Not even the dreamy music of spheres.