Intervals

Interlude: Still Still
Robin Behn

Inside the hole, where it's yellow,
the boy has dropped a quarter
so that the guitar rattles

when he shakes it by the neck.
Knocks, scrapes, scars.
So this is what music is.

The wooden body is no longer
bigger than his body.
The strings, which, when

he strums them,
go on forever are forever
wound around small pegs

shaped like the big ones
they wrap the ropes around,
there being an absence of

able-bodied mourners
to lower, with the softer machines
of their bodies, the coffin down.

It was a cold day.
The boy had not been born yet,
but stood among us

warm in his round place.
Then, from the distance,
the bagpiper who'd been found

in the yellow pages
extracted the horizon note
like a red needle from the sky.

And so it was not with nothing
human our friend was lowered.
This is what music is.

But how did it sound to the boy,
the bladder of cries squeezed
through the slit throat

when there had not been anything
yet to cry about?
The solace of music is

not that we recognize it.
It is that the hearing
comes from before and is wound

around after. Between,
our bad singing a stranger
dozed, then bulldozed to.

At home, in its case, the guitar
was hunkered inside the dark
into which music goes,

and the more particular dark
from which music comes
was inside of it.

The sound hole swallowed and passed back
buckets of silence
until the inner and outer dark

had the same yellow smell.
This, while the song the boy
would pay for waited, still still.



Apples
Grace Schulman

Rain hazes a street cart's green umbrella
but not its apples, heaped in paper cartons,
dry under cling film. The apple man,

who shirrs his mouth as though eating tart fruit,
exhibits four like racehorses at auction:
Blacktwig, Holland, Crimson King, Salome.

I tried one and its cold grain jolted memory:
a hill where meager apples fell so bruised
that locals wondered why we scooped them up,

my friend and I, in matching navy blazers.
One bite and I heard her laughter toll,
free as school's out, her face flushed in late sun.

I asked the apple merchant for another,
jaunty as Cezanne's still-life reds and yellows,
having more life than stillness, telling us,

uncut, unpeeled, they are not for the feast
but for themselves, and building strength to fly
at any moment, leap from a skewed bowl,

whirl in the air, and roll off a tilted table.
Fruit-stand vendor, master of Northern Spies,
let a loose apple teach me how to spin

at random, burn in light and rave in shadows.
Bring me a Winesap like the one Eve tasted,
savored and shared, and asked for more.

No fool, she knew that beauty strikes just once,
hard, never in comfort. For that bitter fruit,
tasting of earth and song, I'd risk exile.

The air is bland here. I would forfeit mist
for hail, put on a robe of dandelions,
and run out, broken, to weep and curse — for joy.



After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard
Charles Wright

East of me, west of me, full summer.
How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.
Birds fly back and forth across the lawn
looking for home
As night drifts up like a little boat.

Day after day, I become of less use to myself.
Like this mockingbird,
I flit from one thing to the next.
What do I have to look forward to at fifty-four?
Tomorrow is dark.
Day-after-tomorrow is darker still.

The sky dogs are whimpering.
Fireflies are dragging the hush of evening
up from the damp grass.
Into the world's tumult, into the chaos of every day,
Go quietly, quietly.