On Ruth Stone Releasing the Orb              

by Lynne Thompson

           

All of this was just a way to dream of Dave

Brubeck’s Blue Rondo à la Turk, of Pablo

Casals bowing Bach’s Suite No. 1 with such

duende, such

effluence that every living thing—the purple

finch eating its thistle and millet,

grown men selling cut-rate wares, children skipping rope—

halted their own joy to listen. The poet said

I am the simple sieve that drinks the universe but

just as she said so, some unsettled American

killed a Jew, an uneasy Jew killed some

Lebanese children he’d never met, their eyes turned to

Mecca, to other dominions and their schisms.

No one was listening to the music, not Chopin’s

Opus No. 9, not Oscar Peterson

priming his piano with Perdido. Oh, how

quickly the melody fades to

riffs on revenge, to clank and helmets,

strut and baby birds with stiff wings in the desert.

Teach the children lessons in delight the poet urged, knowing

ultimately they need to learn of sweet

verbena; the way the artist

Watanabe Kazan painted inner virtue,

Xanadu being just another color dripping from his brush.

You can live with this:

zinnias thriving in a field…on your lips the taste of something.

* * * * *

"On Ruth Stone Releasing the Orb" was first published in Solo Novo, V. 2 (2012).