in the ruined chapel
of the heart
not a hymnal to be found
the choir
still singing
Posts Tagged ‘singing’
One Alleluia
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged reslilience, singing on March 14, 2024| 8 Comments »
At the Aladdin’s Lamp Cabin on Molas Pass
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged camping, joy, singing on July 3, 2023| 4 Comments »
Let me remember this night
dancing in the deep woods—
the patio our stage
the stars like sequins
the full moon a spotlight
and every song a love song
when sung with love
and my god, did we sing,
after all that talk of heartache,
yes, until our voices were near gone,
did we sing.
One Roadtrip
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, mother, roadtrip, sacred, singing on June 23, 2023| 2 Comments »
this song we sing together
as the miles tick by
my temple
Big Picture
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged evolution, friendship, geology, hearing, San Miguel River Canyon, singing, song, Ulli Sir Jesse on November 27, 2022| 13 Comments »
On a rocky white outcrop,
Ulli and I stand in silence
at the edge of the canyon,
held by layers that range
from the Permian to the Cretaceous,
and Ulli begins to sing
a song we sang twenty years ago
and, from the strata of memory,
I unearth the German lyric,
excavate the harmony,
and we join our voices
to the structuring of time,
just one more arrangement
of temporal events
added to the linear record
since the singularity.
And the sound waves tremble
in the sensitive membrane drum
between the middle ear
and the cochlea—
a song of connection,
a song of fading light,
a song that somehow
has origins in the Ichthyostega
that crawled from the sea,
the development of Broca’s area
in the left frontal lobe of the brain,
the mountaineers who would sing
to each other across the Alps at dusk,
and this wonderful woman who
brought these words and this tune from Europe
and taught them to me in Colorado
so that decades later
we might stand side by side on this cliff
and know ourselves lucky—
after all that has happened—
lucky to find ourselves in the same remote place
singing the same familiar song,
the molecules a spiraling ricochet of praise,
our song itself part of the matter
that makes the world,
part of a pattern that is ever overlapping.
Is it any wonder
I cried?
Still Singing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, musical, self, singing, Sound of Music, theater on October 24, 2022| 7 Comments »
There comes a day when a woman knows
she’s more Mother Superior than Maria—
and though she spent decades dreaming
of spinning on stage singing The hills are alive,
she now knows she’s more likely
to be cast standing in a habit, clutching a rosary,
singing Climb every mountain.
How many dreams pass us
before we realize they’ve gone?
Already I know I will never climb Everest,
will not be an Olympic Nordic skier,
will not research the cure for AIDS.
Every day I am less the woman I dreamt I would be
and more the woman I am—
which is, apparently, a woman who sits in the balcony
to see “The Sound of Music” and drives home happy,
still singing about how her heart
wants to beat like the wings of the birds that rise
from the lake to the trees.
A woman who is learning how,
now that her dreams have faded,
she can be more present than ever.
It Did Not Look Useful, But
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dancing, Dolly Parton, friendship, light, singing, woods on October 16, 2022| 6 Comments »
for an hour we danced
in the tiny kitchen
and sang with Dolly,
our voices braided
like eager vines,
and for that hour
I smiled and swayed
and I felt such spaciousness—
like a lost girl in a fairy tale
who has walked through dark woods
and arrived in a glade
with sunlight streaming
and flowers and bird song,
and though she’s still lost,
for this moment she’s safe,
not only safe, but happy,
truly deeply happy,
and when she reenters
the cold, dark woods,
as she must,
a bit of the shine
has twined into her.
Even now, I feel it,
the radiance,
how it shimmies
just like we did
beside the old oak cupboards,
how it glitters in the dark,
how it moves.
Remembering My Grandmother
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grandmother, gratefulness, singing on October 9, 2022| 4 Comments »
for Merry Stoll
I loved those Sundays
when I, a teenage girl,
would climb the stairs
to the church choir loft
where my grandmother and I
would sing hymns side by side.
God, I loved her voice,
rich with vibrato and conviction,
loved her wide warble—
not a pure note,
yet wholly in tune.
Of all the selves I have been,
I cherish that girl
who knew to the core
she was lucky
to sit beside such a woman.
She didn’t yet know
nothing lasts forever,
she only knew
how she loved those moments,
their voices weaving together,
their bodies leaning into each other
like two notes grateful to be sung.
Crickets
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged crickets, darkness, love, singing on July 23, 2022| 9 Comments »
When they sing
it is a kind of love,
a pure-toned,
full-bodied ringing
born of friction.
You could say
it’s just a wingstroke
that makes a pulse of sound
that joins with all
the other pulses
to form a river of music,
and you would be right.
But there are many ways
to face the dark.
One is to hide.
One is to prowl.
One is to bring
the bright music
of your body
and offer it
to the night.
Harmony
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communion, harmony, Heartbeat, singing on April 23, 2022| 8 Comments »
Surrounded by steep cliffs
and great open sky,
we stand on the point
and sing—not for money,
not for fame, not even
for the crow that hovers
above us on the wind—
we sing for joy, sing because
in that moment when
eight of us sing there is
one voice among us, one mind,
one invitation to move alone together
through the door of the moment
and know that as much as we
are entirely ourselves,
we are one, oh my god,
we are one.
Listening to “Our Birthright”
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dad, gift, New York, singing on March 21, 2022| 8 Comments »
composed by Jeffrey Nytch, conducted by Elizabeth Swanson
Sitting in the red velvet chair
in the first tier box of Carnegie Hall,
I was well aware
that for some in the audience,
this was just another song being sung,
one more moment of beauty
in a long string of moments of beauty,
but for me, looking down at that stage
full of singers, the pianist, the conductor,
I saw, too, the same space thirty-seven years ago
when my father and I sat in chairs on the stage
and listened to Vladimir Ashkenazy play piano
and my dad whispered to me,
This is only the first time
you’ll be on stage at Carnegie Hall.
So when one hundred twenty people
began to sing words I wrote,
their voices both thundersome and tender,
I lived into the chance to be who
my dad believed I could be,
the chance to live through music,
the chance to grow into a dream.
For When People Ask
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged feelings, grief, joy, paradox, singing on March 13, 2022| 23 Comments »
I want a word that means
okay and not okay,
a word that means
devastated and stunned with joy.
I want the word that says
I feel it all, all at once.
The heart is not like a songbird
singing only one note at a time,
more like a Tuvan throat singer
able to sing both a drone
and simultaneously
two or three harmonics high above it—
a sound, the Tuvans say,
that gives the impression
of wind swirling among rocks.
The heart understands the swirl,
how the churning of opposite feelings
weaves through us like an insistent breeze,
leads us wordlessly deeper into ourselves,
blesses us with paradox
so we might walk more openly
into this world so rife with devastation,
this world so ripe with joy.
*
by the way, friends, if you are aware of a word in another language that means okay/not okay, gosh, I would love to know it
Unity
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communion, Heartbeat, singing, song on January 5, 2022| 6 Comments »
Today we lose the words
yours and mine and find
in their absence a song
that can only be sung together.
How did we ever think
we could attempt
this humanness alone?
To the table of love,
we bring soup, bring cherries,
bring the bread of our own
sweet communion.
We bring scissors to cut away
the tresses of the past,
bring dark wine to toast
the courage of showing up exposed.
And when we forget
the words to the song,
well, there is always laughter.
And when we forget to laugh,
well, there is always
the union of tears—
the way many rivers
become one river,
the way many voices
become one song.
Gonna Rise Up Singing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, cause and effect, daughter, eternity, mother, singing on November 15, 2021| 4 Comments »
What we do now echoes into eternity.
—Marcus Aurelius
If what we do now echoes into eternity,
then let there be more mornings such as this one
in which my mother wakes me by singing
a thin thread of melody
that praises the beauty of the day.
By breakfast, I feel the small reverberations
of her joy as they ricochet in me
chiming against loss and fear,
an unabashed gladness that rings
against the holy ribs,
that spirals inside the aortal caves,
that peals through the chasms of the hours.
By afternoon, it’s coruscating, resonating,
a bit of aural shine against the day’s ache,
helping me meet the world just
a bit more brightly.
Just think, after an eternity, how much
beauty might have come from one
simple tune sung by one open heart
willing to sing for one moment what is true.
By Example
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged harmony, singing, Ulli Sir Jesse on August 6, 2021| 3 Comments »
for Ulli, Happy Birthday!
I love harmony, she says as she claps
and laughs and settles in her chair
in the sun. And I think of all the times
we have sung, have sung in harmony—
in stairwells and forests, on stages
and in living rooms, standing
in the current of the Gunnison River
and sitting on the back stoop of the farm,
our voices soaring on different paths together—
like two notes holding hands as they move
together through time.
I have come to trust her voice below
as I sing in some interval above.
I have come to trust what voices do
is a metaphor for love. I have come
to trust that dissonance can always
be resolved. I have come to trust
that harmony is the soundtrack of the soul.
And so we sing. We sing again—
sing in the sun, in the rain.
And though we sing of loss, though we sing
of great change, though we sing
of goodbyes and breaking chains,
the harmony offers its beauty to everything,
and so in this uncertain world
she finds and shares harmony
and we sing and we sing and we sing.
Over a Year Later, I Grieve
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Corona Virus, friendship, Heartbeat, loss, singing on May 13, 2021| 2 Comments »
for Heartbeat, singing together since 1994
Every week we sang, sang blues
and ballads, folk songs,
rounds, pop songs, jazz,
love songs, chants. And we
didn’t just sing, we touched
and hugged, leaned in and loved,
ran our fingers through the waves
of each other’s hair, laughed till we peed,
and jostled and shoved and teased
and offered tissues and kissed cheeks
and brought the shared melodic air
into our bodies and returned it
into the room in currents of ecstatic song.
Oh we sang, how we sang, as if
singing were a life raft that kept us afloat
on the aching broken world.
Now, I sing alone in the kitchen.
Sometimes I’m haunted by the part
I sing—a harmony line unanchored
by the melody. With no tonic,
the tune feels off. There is so much
that’s missing, that’s lost.
Sometimes I make up a new song
and sing about what is here.
Good morning, hummingbird.
Good morning, loneliness. Good
morning big empty room.
The air holds the notes like shimmering drops
that sometimes leak out of my eyes
when I think of how we sang, the music
a life raft, and your voices, my friends, the oars.
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.
On a Night When the World Seems Doomed
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged doom, Heartbeat, lucky to be alive, singing on August 10, 2020| 3 Comments »
for Heartbeat
If I said we sat in a circle
in an open air room made of stones
with tall arched windows
and night sky for a dome
and drank wine and laughed
and teased and wept,
if I said we then sang by candlelight
until the milky way
spilled into our throats
and our voices swirled like vines
that twine and tendril to climb themselves,
if I said how, when we sang our last song,
the wind rustled in the aspen
in quiet applause and then stilled
and a shooting star unspooled
its bright fleeting ribbon, well,
I would barely believe it myself
that the world could feel so full of beauty,
except I was there and felt
the night as it cradled us,
felt that vine take root, still taste
just a bit of that milky way in my thoughts
creamy, nourishing, vast.
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.
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.