1. Allegro Maestoso
The mind rouses to music: surging under
life’s stagnant pool, it builds to overflow
then cataracts with the creative wonder
one fallen napping while the day runs slow
feels when a tumult rouses him in thunder,
who searches from his drizzle-dusted window
the grays of rain, the driven forest in turmoil,
vast, churning, oceanic green aboil.
2. Adagio
Sundown changes to stars on the lake’s glass.
Clouds drift, black ice floes blotting a thin moon.
Water’s depths, the sky’s depths, become one place,
making, so legend tells, tomorrow’s sun
out of the extinguished day’s ashes,
or so I think, watching a black unknown
I greet like someone I pretend to know.
Adagio, breathe the muted chords. Adagio.
3. Rondo: Allegro
Licked slick as rain, tottery, its doe alert
for noise, a newborn fawn blinks at the forest;
surging up birth streams as though crazed with regret,
salmon plunge past a bear’s hunger; breast on breast,
a mother’s heart, her child’s heart, throb as one heart
–all throbbing with creation. The pianist
rises, bows. Hushed as breath, a crowded pause
breaks like the rush of memory. Applause.