And bless me. I have just opened a copy of "Poetry" (April 2004) and the first poem there is by Alicia (A. E. Stallings) and is a cracker about music.
"Prelude".
Engrossing.
Janet
PRELUDE
Lately, at the beginning of concerts when
The first-chair violin
Plays the A 4-40 and the bows
Go whirring about the instruments like wings
Over unfingered strings,
The cycling fifths, spectral arpeggios,
As the oboe lights the pure torch of the note,
Something in my throat
Constricts and tears are startled to my eyes,
Helplessly. And lately when I stand
Torn ticket in my hand
In the foyers of museums I surprise
You with a quaver in my rote reply—
Again I overbrim
And corners of the room go prismed, dim.
You'd like to think that it is Truth and Art
That I am shaken by,
So that I must discharge a freighted heart;
But it is not when cellos shoulder the tune,
Nor changing of the key
Nor resolution of disharmony
That makes me almmost tremble, and it is not
The ambered afternoon
Slanting through motes of dust a painter caught
Four hundred years ago as someone stands
Opening the blank
Future like a letter in her hands.
It is not masterpieces of first rank,
Not something made
By once-warm fingers, nothing painted, played.
No, no. It is something else. It is something raw
That suddenly falls
Upon me at the start, like loss of awe—
The vertigo of possibility—
The pictures I don't see,
The open strings, the perfect intervals.
A.E. Stallings
[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited February 12, 2007).]
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