A thread to string it on
Lately I have neither composed melody nor lyric, because music, however you follow its fragrance, requires the flower. Simple or complex, the blossom must open, the color be expressive and expressed: if that bud is all-potential, then the hand must wait for later summer, for more sun, for rain; and if the petals have stretched, dried and fallen, then the mind must imagine flowers, and the tongue will wait for spring. Either way, an absence makes the heart redundant, the song oblique, a tangent, and all attempts to coax it hither are nothing less than calling butterflies from the sky, with similar result.
The problem arises from a basic truth of living, that at times the sun rises and at times it sets: flowers open and close to the same cycle and same short season: and while we wish and want after unending opening, still there is a time to close, close the eyes, close the ear, close the mouth, and sleep a while. In between the waking and the dream there is a time of reverie, when real acceptance comes, and we see our best attempts as best attempts, our most blind actions as just blind acts, and the caresses and embraces that came by choice or chance were memories of flowers that will keep us well through night and bitter weather, after-harvest, frost and all the like. there is a time for the sun to rise and a time for it to set, though my star not constant as the one hat rises daily in the east, setting daily in the west… but that’s not it: it is I that am not so constant as the earth, that never fails nor forgets to turn toward the bright, warm welcome every day; instead I turn when I remember, or when I can, or when some momentary twist of melody reminds me of a smile, or kiss, or charity that I should not forget, and don’t.
I can help certain things, all within my small domain: I can breath and watch my breath. I can listen well, or less well. I can eat that my body be strong. And I can adopt practices that life me to my feet when the world has shaken or water’s underfoot. But I cannot fully tell the Doubts depart, or age await my whim to meet it – some, yes; all, no – have no power but to watch and learn when a flower opens or a flower wilts, to learn and practice my response, to respond the best I can with what I am, right there, right then.
Tonight I wait for melody but melody does not come. And lyric must be simple prose without a thread to string it on.
