Dad would lie on his back
in the middle of the living room.
I would step into his open palms
on either side of his shoulders
and slowly, he’d lift me into the air.
I loved the wavering, the bobble
before the balance, the moments
of freedom when I floated above him.
Today, when the concert ended
with “What a Wonderful World,”
it was only in the last verse I realized
they’d played Dad’s favorite song
on this day, his birthday, almost
five years after his death, and
I felt it again, that sense of being
elevated by a power greater than my own.
Tears falling even as I started
to laugh. Laughter rising even
as I started to cry. The gift of it all
swirling in me as ecstatic as the violins,
primal and playful as the drum beat,
unexpected as the riffs on the piano,
familiar as my dad’s hands wrapped
around my soles pressing me higher,
oh wonderful world, higher.
Posts Tagged ‘music’
July 5
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, childhood, dad, daughter, father, memory, music, remembrance, what a wonderful world on July 5, 2026| 2 Comments »
No Detail Too Small
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged coffee, details, music, noticing, small things, travel on June 7, 2026| 10 Comments »
The weather changes the beans,
Svetlana tells me as we sit in her home.
I sip the coffee she’s made me,
a blend she and her partner created
from five different beans that they roast
themselves. She can taste in her cup
whether the growing season was rainy
or dry. Everything changes everything.
No detail too small to link us to the world
of the real, to help us remember who we are.
I am thinking of the piano player
today in Santa Fe. As her hands
flew across the keys, passionate
and precise, it was the way she moved
her eyebrows that stirred me,
her utter commitment and wonder
expressed in a single arch or furrow,
lift or frown. I am thinking of how
my friends Don and Mindy have written
the word wisdum on the wall in their home,
and how all day I have giggled about it.
They can seem so trifling, the details
that capture us, claim us, rearrange us.
I once thought redemption was something grand.
Something costly. Unlikely. Now I believe
the lost pieces of ourselves can, in part, be
recovered through noticing the smallest of things—
the raising of a brow, a handwritten word,
the treble notes in a roasted coffee bean.
Sitting Beside the Cellist During Sound Check
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cello, music, poem, rhyming on May 8, 2026| 10 Comments »
for Noah Hoffeld
With the long slow pull and push
of the bow on the strings
in so few notes he carries
the unsayable into the room
till the air rhymes with loss
and honey and amethyst sky
and every verb I’ve ever known
slips out of the clunky shoes of its syllables
to sit at the foot of the cello
saying, “teach me.”
Listening to Glen Velez in a Garden in Ohio
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged concrete poem, garden, glen velez, gong, music, silence on May 7, 2026| 5 Comments »
In a Difficult Time, I Remember
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Brahms, concert, kindness, Kyra Kopestonksky, music on December 23, 2025| 6 Comments »
for Kyra
In a corrugated metal culvert, tall enough
to walk in, Kyra made us a nest of warm blankets.
We entered the steel tube from the same side
the flash floods enter each fall, and we curled
into the softness she’d prepared. Meanwhile,
she settled on a stool and began to bow her cello,
a Brahms lullaby meant to lull and soothe.
Above us, cars hummed along on the highway.
Beside us, daylight glowed from both round ends.
Inside me, what was broken was still so deeply broken,
but I felt, too, the gentling that arrives with surprise
beauty. There are times someone tends to our hearts
with such warmth, such goodness, our hearts
cannot help but bloom. Even when the heart soil is barren.
Even when there’s no chance for rain. Even in the midst
of breaking—there, just at the edge of perception—
the heart becomes a wildflower in spring. It is simple kindness
that grows us, the kind my friend brought with her everywhere.
Even now, I can see her swaying as she played,
her body a radiant pendulum draped in red velvet.
Even now, I hear the long, sonorous notes of her song.
Even now, I think of her smile, humble and shy, and
how that moment still reverberates—her cello, our sighs,
the laughter that somehow finds its way to our lips
in the saddest of times. Years later, her kindness still echoes.
Remembering Rose
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aloneness, dancing, grandmother, music on December 17, 2025| 8 Comments »
I remember her waltzing across the living room
singing, Somewhere my love, dah dah dah, dah,
dah dah. She was dancing alone, as she often did,
but oh, could she waltz, small feet like wings, her thin
body gliding past tables and chairs, weaving, spinning,
her arms lifted up in the air around a loving partner
who had never been there. I don’t think
she knew the rest of the words, or at least
she didn’t sing them. Always Somewhere
my love, again and again, like a promise
she wanted to believe in. She danced
like that through my childhood. Perhaps
dancing itself was her love. I can see her now
box stepping, one, two, three, one two three,
each step a step closer to all she did not have.
Fräulein
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, daughter, music, singing, song on August 20, 2025| 4 Comments »
Just because it’s a song about a man leaving a woman
and realizing he still loves her doesn’t mean
it isn’t also a song about a mother and a daughter
singing their hearts out in a car, both of us
falling in love with what the human voice can do
and what a song can do when two people choose
to sing it together, over and over, until it becomes
our anthem, until it becomes the glue in something
larger than we are, something less about the words
and more about the transmission of love,
the shared moments in which we come together
to sing it, you on the melody with Tyler Childers,
me on the harmony with Colter Wall. And the more
we sing it, the more I’m in love not just with the song,
but with you, because no matter what the song is about,
it’s our song, and we choose to sing it again and again,
because joy, because the way two voices come together
as one, even out of tune, because, Fräulein, this song is ours.
You belong to this world with
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, bluegrass, fire, music, wildfire on July 11, 2025| Leave a Comment »
its early morning thunderstorm
that wakes you with a clap,
this world of early morning rain
and dusty midday paths,
this world with plumes of wildfire
that fill the air by evening,
the valleys thickly choked with smoke,
the mountains disappearing.
You belong to this world of tinder.
Sometimes it hurts to belong.
You belong to the burning world of fear
as much as the world of song.
You most surely belong to music,
to this world of euphoric dancing
And as you dance, you smile,
dance as if it’s your calling.
They sing of constant sorrow.
You dance. The ash keeps falling.
In Harsh Times
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged desert, hope, music, seed, song, transformation on July 4, 2025| 11 Comments »
I know, music alone
will not save us. But tonight
when my daughter played
the song we both love,
we smiled at each other,
all giddy and warm,
and some shriveled
part of me revived.
It was like those seeds
in the desert that wait years
to germinate—all they need
is one good rain.
That’s what a song can do.
Remind us our hope
is merely dormant, not dead.
Who could blame me, then,
for wanting to bring a song
to the whole thirsty world,
a song that soaks into
our parched hearts,
stunning us with just how fast
even the harshest world
can transform.