The leaf
We sang for hours
and when I left rehearsal
I was thinking
about chardonnay,
not tea or hot water
and honey, something glassy
and cold, when unexpectedly
a leaf
touched the toe of my boot
flipped and skidded
on the asphalt
then took to the air
flying high like the song
we'd laboured over
lifting as if from a hand
and tossed into the dark.
Abruptly I remembered
the wind, how it wailed
that November before
I met you, filling the night
with robbers and thugs,
and how morning
had fetched a new world
full of nakedness.
~ 2017In the holy air
I spend the evening
in song, with a bunch of women
taking breath,
initiating sound in our larynx,
influencing it with our skull and throat,
then shaping it into joy.
Some days I don't want to leave
my hearth and couch
or I'm too sad or I'm too distracted,
but I take my resonator downtown anyhow,
I take my air and my sheet music.
These days we sing hallelujah
or triumphant and the director
puts her hands in the air
and laughs we all laugh
or we close our eyes
and listen to our own voices
the way they hold themselves
in a chord, in the holy air
between women standing on carpet
and someplace unseen,
a place exultant, a place
we take home with us,
rejoicing.
~ 2013Three Notes
I know a place
where you can sing three notes
and the echo is so slow
it comes back to you as a chord
you can stand with your arms out
and look up, sing the first, the third, the fifth
and a chord fills the spaces
like smoke from a campfire
dancing while the uncles tell their stories
like aurora borealis
in the night sky above Anderson lake
like the pure cold touch
of a winter's first snowfall
I think it's what heaven sounds like
or love, when it's found at last
filling the high dome of your heart
and you can stand with your arms out
believing in everything.
~ 2012
Photo by Dall-e