Composing
If you curve your fingers to the keys, their white plains and black ridges, if you feel their smoothness like a song, gather their dust into your static and sit in the crackling, you will find melody, harmony, your heart hammering on.
The Prompt
This poem was written, surprise, surprise, while I was seated at the piano. I was about to start playing something, but then everything—me, the keys, the possibility of sound—felt so alive that all I could do was sit still and quiet, taking in the texture of the keys, the dust at their edges, the air that wrapped us. Do you know that feeling? That intensity of stillness that feels more alive, more active and electric than any conceivable motion? Music stirs that feeling for me often. This might be the first time I’ve felt that simply seated at an instrument, without actually creating sound.
For today’s prompt, I invite you to consider your own encounters with musical instruments. How many do you suppose you’ve physically touched—even just to strike a single note—in your life time? Take a little inventory if you’d like. What’s the first instrument you ever remember hearing live? Playing yourself? Wishing you could play? What do you remember of elementary school music class? Of the high school marching band? Is there a particular piano or guitar or set of bagpipes whose music plays like a soundtrack to your memories?
As you sit with these questions and memories, notice if a particular instrument (or kind of instrument) feels the zingiest to you. If that instrument is currently available to you, sit with it. Look at it, feel it, play it, listen to it. Dust or tune the poor thing, for crying out loud. If you can’t physically access that instrument, can you do so in your imagination? Can you close your eyes and allow yourself to fully, deeply imagine the sensory experience of touching, hearing, or playing that instrument? What does that stir?
Amidst all these stirrings, is there a poem waiting to be written?
P.S. If I just compelled you to go deep into a visualization of playing the recorder in a room full of grade schoolers, I am so, so sorry. But I’d still love to read your poem!
I never learned to play
.
I never learned to play, but my fiancé's brother did
his hands flexing across the keys in a blur
playing my mother’s piano at my parents’ house
while I laid on the ground, soaking it in
content to let him pick
what he would play at our wedding
before the words, around the words, after the words
all without words.
.
I never learned to play, but my oldest daughter did
strumming a black guitar for years on end
playing “Man on Fire” for her dad’s birthday gift
my middle daughter singing the chorus.
.
I never learned to play, but my middle daughter tried
tucking the violin under her chin, finding little tunes
among the plucks and squeaks of strings
while I lay on the couch, drinking it in.
.
I never learned to play, but my son taught himself
headphones plugged into a shy keyboard
learning the notes from a man on YouTube.
For a gift, I ask him to play for me, and “Spring”
by Vivaldi poured out like an upended cask
of molten gold, spilling and spreading until
the whole floor gleamed, our skin now covered
in a thin sheet of gold: a statue of a woman sitting
listening to her son play.
Goodness, it has been a busy few works days since reading Lisa's poem and prompt, but the fog of work just lifted!
Meadow Hawk
Drum notes rolling through the trees,
the thump of plastic and wood,
synthetic skins and mysterious shakers,
sounds sent across the forest,
the hills, the oceans
and the universe.
These beats from me to you
here to there
a thread of possible connection
creeping in when least expected.
Hawk circling quiet meadows,
green laced fields, autumns entry
adding an ancient voice
to the stream of sacred harmony
that sings to every corner,
every village,
every heart,
Opening again and again
to the rhythm of love.