Category: Poetry

  
credit: http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs41/i/2009/055/e/6/___Bass_Clef____by_cheinrich1981.jpg

A parade courses through my days,
one of twitters chirped from devices and trees.

An avuncular path leading back to my ears
sounds the thrumming pump of plasma drums.

I can hear my blood when the music starts,
like the rhythmic stump of dog tail in mid-scratch.

Silence moves me too in humming refrigerators,
ticking clocks, and buzzing transformers above.

Door knocks muted wood of knuckles shy
jar my attention in irritated curiosity and dread.

Like the broken peace pierced shrilly,
a dog barks inside echoing plaster and tile.

Water pour-sliding down pipes in gushes
forced like fingers hard-pressed on a fingerboard.

I hear the memory thrust of my grandfather,
his fingers crushing mine high atop the cello’s face.

“No, like dees, you put like dees, here!!”
A stranger loved in osmotic care for a family’s music.

Wind cries rarely as do the clouds in this desert,
so the trills of trickling rain sing sweetly suckling tears.

Muffled voices beyond closed doors wordlessly
play mornings mostly before the whispers of evening.

When the clanging of aluminum, teflon and iron
ring the truth fed in tones nourished by hand, we sing.

Our collective voices intone in the eyes of intention,
a shrugging will, and love-notes tucked in school lunch sacks.  

And when the confetti clears, the bass drum moves on,
the choir of antiquity will accompany me, soloist, alto, sotto voce.