The Minor Keys by David de Young

I got wine drunk in the Holiday Inn Notre Dame
with a view of the Eiffel Tower
put on Brahms Symphony #1 in C Minor

and was back in my British History classroom
on an August night in 1982
on the second floor of Alumni Recitation Hall

working out ways to include
English Beat and Gang of Four lyrics
in my poly sci and econ finals

blasting the Sir Georg Solti 1979 recordings
with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
on my Sony Walkman and portable speakers

bought for me by a girl who’d sympathized
I’d fallen in love with her
O the power of the minor keys

reaching across the years There were times
I would have traded Brahms’s four symphonies
for Beethoven’s nine and skipped away

happy and that was one of them
So many things were clear to me then
before the wine and Paris and the years

David de Young holds an MFA from NYU’s Creative Writing program and is the proprietor of a small independent publisher, Nordic Moon Press. He lives in Finland with his wife and three children. In addition to poetry and short fiction, he writes regular essays about anything that strikes his fancy on his Substack, “Why This? Why Now?”