Sometimes another person knows our heart
so well they offer us a song that becomes,
at least for a moment, our anthem.
In that moment, listening to lyric and melody,
the entire body re-attunes to life,
each cell turning not only toward the music
but also toward the giver,
and we are led deeper into that strange
and beautiful grotto of our heart
with its mosses and echoes,
a place at once strange and familiar,
and the song becomes a shining remover
of darkness, its light bouncing on our inner walls
until we relearn who we are—
the light of a million suns.
Posts Tagged ‘music’
Soundtrack
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, dark, friendship, light, music on November 12, 2022| 2 Comments »
Because Last Night I Dreamt of You
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dream, drums, love, music on October 6, 2022| 6 Comments »
This morning I wake and my body
is a concert hall still echoing
the beauty of the night before—
like the morning after the symphony
when the theater walls and
the red velvet curtains still remember
the swell, the strings, the silence
before the applause. Oh,
how I love my body on these mornings.
I linger in the sheets, my eyes closed,
my arms flung over my head,
my belly soft as I open myself to memory.
It’s fleeting, it’s flirty, it’s there,
then it’s not. What was symphonic
is now a mere echo of what was—
as if everyone left, but the drummer
is still there alone on stage,
beating out a tempo, complex,
but true. Hello heart. Hello heart.
Was it really just a dream?
The melody escapes me,
but I swear I still hear the rhythm.
Contentment
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged contentment, music, tears on August 24, 2022| 4 Comments »
What were you doing when you last felt content?
—Ada Limón
And there, beneath the white tent,
beneath the blue sky, beneath the stars
I could not see, while spinning somewhere
inside a spiral galaxy, I closed my eyes
and let the sound of flute and piano find me,
an Irish song meant to be played with a wee lilt,
though the tune itself knew something of loss,
and I felt my lungs swell and my heart expand
felt my spine straighten and my soles ground,
and I floated inside the music, stunned and surprised
by the vibrant inheritance of being alive. I hummed
with full cellular resonance and then, I was crying—
a warm spilling of tears—for what?
for beauty? for loss? for living with both in one breath?
What was it the tears meant? Oh friends,
as I felt it all with no attempt to push it away,
I was wildly, alively content.
By Now You’d Think I’d Know
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged choice, communion, music, yes on July 31, 2022| 4 Comments »
There is a secret music
that hides inside each yes.
At first we think we know
the tune. Heck, we might
even think we wrote it.
But soon, after yessing,
we learn there is a much
grander score than we ever
might have guessed,
and now we hear how
just one yes,
plucked like a string,
creates harmonies
and dissonances
and asks us to listen again,
not for what we think we hear,
but for everything else—
the soundtrack of the infinite after,
Perhaps you notice it, too,
how the masterpiece
needs you. How each note
informs the song forever.
Anti-Lamentation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brokenness, grief, music, piano, record player on February 26, 2022| 11 Comments »
There was that summer
when my record player broke,
the needle always returning
to the first song and playing
the whole record again and again,
through morning, through midnight,
and so George Winston’s Winter into Spring
played all through my summer.
Soft and pensive, each melodic phrase
hung spare in the air as if inviting
revelation or breath
before burbling forward like snowmelt.
How I loved that summer,
every moment of it kissed
with chords shattered into arpeggios,
silences and grace notes.
Sometimes breaking brings a gift
we didn’t know we needed,
the way a broken record player
steeped me for months
in the grace of a melancholic beauty
and made the haunting familiar.
The way a broken heart can bring up
a record of beautiful memories,
one after another, day after day,
and somehow heal us by making a masterpiece
of the wreckage.
Trough
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged being present, grief, music on November 10, 2021| 8 Comments »
There will be more
swells of grief that tug
me into their gray embrace,
and swirls of lament,
and great rollers of loss,
and rising waves of ache.
But for now,
the morning sun
slips low through the window
in a major key
and the cat finds a home
in my lap and purrs
and the tea in my cup
is warm and full of bright notes
and I’m here, in this
peace, in this sunlit
octave, I’m here.
On the Street Corner
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged invitation, jazz, music on August 5, 2021| Leave a Comment »
In the dark, we follow
the wail of live jazz
till at last we discover
the trio playing
on the street corner.
Not all invitations
to fall in love with life
are this easy to follow—
just turn the corner,
walk a few blocks,
then find a place to linger.
But tonight, the invitation
is so clear: to be led by the music
of the moment, to listen
with the silence inside.
For Brahms on His Birthday
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Brahms, communion, connection, darkness, music on May 8, 2021| 2 Comments »
For your birthday, Johannes,
I listened to your first piano concerto,
my heart trembling like a tuning fork
as the ivory keys and nylon strings
conversed about tenebrous grief and loss.
No one hissed in the audience
the way they did when your concerto
debuted. In fact, in my kitchen,
I sighed. I gasped. I thanked you
for the turbulence. What a gift when our sorrow
meets a sister sorrow so beautiful
we forget our own story, our own name,
and we tender what’s left
of our aching hearts to the blooming dark
that even now opens around us, inside us.
The Tide is High
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Blondie, buoyancy, music, ocean, salt, singing on April 4, 2021| 8 Comments »
lyrics from "The Tide Is High" by John Holt, 1967
Something about the unsinkable reggae beat,
and in just three notes, I’m again my young self,
dancing alone in my bedroom,
singing as if I am one with the song,
as if it were written just for me,
I’m not the kind of girl
who gives up just like that, oh no, oh!
And singing it now on a Sunday afternoon,
I’m caught in a surprise riptide of joy
and start to lilt around the room,
though just moments ago I was weeping,
buried beneath the salt of worry,
but here I am, dancing alone,
hips rocking, my shoulders a rolling sea,
my voice surfing above the bright swell of trumpets.
The tide is high but I’m holding on.
Sometimes a song is a lifeline,
not because it pulls me out of the water,
but because it tosses me deeper in,
and I feel I’m no longer trapping myself
in a life the size of a teacup—
no, in this moment I am oceanic,
an Atlantic of joy, a Pacific of wonder
vast enough to hold everything,
and the tide is high
and all that salt only makes me more buoyant
as I play in the generous waves.
That Song
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, loss, lost, map, music, song on July 7, 2020| 2 Comments »
I want to slip into the song
you sang, the one with verse
about loss. I want to hang
on its notes as if they were branches
I could swing from, want to climb
through its chorus, want to meet it
in its rests, want to offer it tea.
I want to ask the guitar
about your fingers, about
how they knew where
to find the melody. And how?
I want to speak with the loss itself,
want to ask it if it’s sure its lost,
want to offer it a map made of apples
and wings and moon.
I want to hear the silence after
the song, and then beg it, beg it,
to keep singing.
In a Circle Six Feet Apart in Town Park
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, Heartbeat, joy, music, singing, tears on May 26, 2020| 4 Comments »
Perhaps we stumbled
on the words, perhaps
we forgot a note,
forgot a bridge,
bumbled our entrances,
fumbled our parts,
but we sang, oh yes,
we sang into the low golden light
of summer, sang
because joy, because
harmony, sang because
lonely, because fear,
sang because, tears
spilling down our cheeks,
we could sing, oh friends,
before we said goodbye,
we could sing.
New Soundtrack
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged improvisation, music, singing, song, sound, spontaneity on May 18, 2020| Leave a Comment »
All day the world improvises
a song for me—song of bickering robins
and whispering grass, bright chime
of a text and gravel trucks that grumble
on the highway as they pass.
The song I would sing for you, let it be
as spontaneous as the chattering
of the cat watching hummingbirds,
as sharp as the flap of the flag in the wind.
Let me not sing the same song I’ve sung before.
This is the time to sing it new, to sing
the song we didn’t know we were brave enough
to sing. This is the time to sing
the most honest song, thorn song,
green song, yelp of relentless shine.
This is the time to sing as if our lives
depend on it, sing the song
that comes out of attending.
Song of pushing through dirt.
Song we don’t know yet.
Anthem
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged loss, music, sound on May 9, 2020| 12 Comments »
Today’s anthem is not
my chorus of curses
when the cat knocked
the glass of sauvignon blanc
into my open laptop.
It’s not the clashing swords
in the movie we watched
nor the sobbing
that shook me this morning
when I tried to speak of loss.
The anthem is not
the click of the door
nor the snap of the branch
beneath the Stellar’s jay
nor the soundless slide
of the moon.
Today’s anthem was the hum
I know you would have made
if you’d held me while I wept,
the waves of our breath
inviting us to wade
deeper in.
Some Enchanted Evenings
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, Corona Virus, Dennis McNeil, music, singing on March 27, 2020| 6 Comments »
with gratitude for Dennis McNeil
Every night now as I make dinner in Colorado,
I listen to a tenor sing live from his back porch
in California near the coast.
While I chop onions and chard
and sip on sauvignon blanc,
he belts tunes from Oklahoma
and Phantom of the Opera,
patriotic songs and Frank Sinatra,
and I sing along, my small soprano lifted
by his generous voice that baptizes the room.
This is the world I believe in—
a world ringing with beauty.
A world where people share their gifts
with strangers, knowing our lives
depend on this.
Between songs, he toasts us with gin,
and smiles. I return his toast with wine.
This is the way we carry each other
through difficulties, one song at a time.
Golden Slumbers
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Beatles, Golden Slumbers, home, music, tears on March 6, 2020| 4 Comments »
Please pretty darlin’, do not cry.
—Paul McCartney, “Golden Slumbers” adapted from Thomas Dekkers’ “Cradle Song”
And if the candle noticed
that I played the song six times,
it didn’t say anything.
And if the pan were aware
that I struggled to find a harmony,
it kept the failure to itself.
And if the kitchen noticed
that I continued to sing the song
long after the recording was done, well—
The onion did its best
to mask any tears
that no one was there to see.
And if once there was a way
to get back homeward, well,
perhaps, perhaps it will appear again.
*To listen, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbcvf8a5BwM
Nada
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged music, nothing, silence, stillness on February 29, 2020| 4 Comments »
written at the Carmelite Monastery in Crestone, CO
It holds everything, silence,
offers itself as a blank staff
on which every song is written—
the tiny hymn of insect wings,
the baritone of the jet as it flies
from one measure of sky to the next,
the dry requiem of rustling grass,
the emphatic chorus of crow.
How generous, silence,
am I willing to know it?
How it includes even the cough,
the belch, retching, the wailing,
the snarl, the scream, the shatter,
and scores these in concert with the hum,
the lush purr, the whisper of the lover,
the ecstatic tremulo of sigh.
There is no sound it refuses to hold.
Its patience is infinite.
So when we, like weary pilgrims,
tired of hearing the percussion
of our own footsteps, arrive at its doors,
silence receives us, welcomes us home.
Remedy
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged heart, medicine, music, song on February 16, 2020| 2 Comments »
Not tea, not pills,
not herbs, not tinctures,
not creams, not salts,
not drops, not injections—
what the heart needs
tonight is a song
so true that its cells rhyme
themselves with the beat.
Tonight, the only medicine
this tired heart needs
is to listen.
One Fermata
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged apocalypse, music on February 2, 2020| Leave a Comment »
One Recipe
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, music, poem, poetry, test on December 22, 2019| 3 Comments »
The Gnoissienne 2 Speaks
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged erik satie, music, poem, poetry, quiet, stillness on November 17, 2019| Leave a Comment »
yet another poem inspired by this composition by Erik Satie
You wonder why I haunt you
like moonlight, why I come to you
like morning fog, dream thick and cool,
why I steep myself into your thoughts
like bergamot in black tea.
You wonder why I seldom leave you,
why I slip into your silences
the way rye darkly slips into bread.
It is my work to give you shivers,
make you tremble, make you still.
It is my work to make you fall in love
with the darkness inside yourself. It is my work
to be the unexpected black swan, and you,
it is your work to be the night pond.