It’s summer and it’s hot. For reasons having to do with 110.3 official inches of snow in Boston this last winter, and unrelenting cold until late May 2015, I have not put the air-conditioners into the windows. So far my refusal to do so is sticking and sticky. I cope with the heat by recalling our visits to Atlanta every summer. I loved it there, and it was hot in my grandparents’ house, therefore heat makes he happy — or some such nonsense.
Summer also reminds me of music. Most of the family are musical, some fully express their art through their music, others only partly, but it is there. Kate was a pianist and music teacher all her life. She also wrote about making music.
The Schubert Quartet
We fought with music –
we the four –
our bows like battle sabers,
seaying stabbing,
glassanding down to nothingness;
while interwove
with static of our faces – tense as frozen flowers,
worshiping abstraction
omnipotent as love.
When morning came
with gray and empty sky,
we sought again the oracle.
But eyes were drooped with apathy,
and notes and dotted spaces
vague as angel tracts.
And we forgot antiphonies of tone
can reunite like stars among the billows,
astonishing with light.
Reminiscent of Bach
The ivy presumes ten thousand years
In shaping her fugue to the chapel wall
And makes indelible the tone
Of her green music,
Resonant with stone.
New vine ascends, but only to repeat
The ancient theme,
The polyphonic form –
Star, star, and star, and still more leafy stars
Through cadence, clef and chord –
An also universe
Whose pattern is the Lord.