Saturday, June 23, 2007
The Rehearsal (poem)
Today as I was looking through a Mary Oliver book, I ran across a sheet of paper with this poem which I had written and forgotten about several years ago. I made a few changes on it, and so here it is in its revised form. (The beginning quote is, of course, from Mary Oliver in her poem "The Lark.")
The Rehearsal
“An ornament of the eternal,”
she said,
and her words caused me to think
of how certain things
can open and take us
to some place we have longed for
but didn't quite know how to find.
Once there was a pianist rehearsing
in a big tent sent atop
the screaming cliffs
near this tiny ocean town,
practicing with nothing
but her instrument (a great black box
with blacker keys laid out
across its top and strings inside its belly)
and the orchestra swelling
beneath her,
just as the waves were booming
outside.
(It was a concerto, frenzied and wild.)
Some of us had crept inside
to listen,
to draw near to whatever it was
this electric exhilaration
building there in front,
when suddenly it happened,
all our pores opening together,
our eyes, our fibers,
even our hands filling with a dense pleasure,
joy sensuous and immeasurable
surging with the waves of sound
which roared through our bodies now,
here, in this small kingdom,
which was, for the moment, ours.
Dorothy Walters
July 30, 2002—June 23, 2007
