Cantata Andante

For Lydia and Daniel

 

They met because they sang. They heard 

one another sing.

What did she hear when she heard his voice? 

What did he hear, listening to hers?

What wild timbre, what vibrato

almost imperceptible?

 

Any voice is an exhalation 

of wing-beaten air, a breath

blown through laryngeal folds

we learn to control so that we can speak.

Singers refine that control beyond articulation 

to shape invisible air 

into the glorious colors, the resonant pitches

the modulated reverberations of song.

 

But even music is but one phase 

in the spectrum of vibrations

 

and when two lovers hear the mysterious signal,

the harmonic of permission,

of revelation, of opening,

 

their vibrations enter a new phase,

become visible, an auric penumbra,

a light when their eyes meet.

 

This emergent radiance hovers about them, 

diffuse at first, then resonates into a coherence,

a flame that did not exist 

before they met, burning in both and yet

a third thing with its own glow. 

It hovers over them, a luminous cloud leading the lost

through the wilderness, a lodestar.

 

Having met through song,

having explored the epochal harmonies

that awoke in each and both of them,

now they duet in one complex voice.

Now they choir.

​

Bodies Falling

(for Bryan)

 

Stones falling through the dark sky

catch fire the Perseids

the summer I had left 

your mom and wondered

as I lay there on the beach

looking up what augury

glowed in those high flames

random as fireflies

courting with flashes in the night

 

wondered, too,  what

imagination she had

of where she stood just then

mother abandoned wife

 

if she was lost 

too like me

watching wherever she was

these falling stars decay.

​

​

Red Seasons

 

I.

The female

cardinal

not

as strongly 

colored as the 

male,  red 

brown   nest

gathering in 

liliacs says, ah,

winter ends.

 

II.

The Paulonia

“princess tree” 

                        lavender flowers

rampant          stands beside

the jack pine,

 

roots tangled                        

in the same 

crevices           

on the rock‘s face.

III.
& the male 

               cardinal

leaps among the red

 

roses, red

on red

 

fearful of

no   thorns.

 

IV.

maple leaves

red translucent

as they emerge

 

green, then

in June

 

but red, red

again they turn

to reach

the end

leap

into November air.