Pärt

The dust that roars

blossoms and falls

even as the voice goes on,

and then, more slowly, curves.

I have heard this tune long after it vanished:

the sigh of smoke above the factories of the coast,

the sob

of the gulf that takes

the sullied industry of one night out.

In every threnody,

pleasure opens a door,

closes another, closes the eyes

the way one opens

a cage of moths to dust

the garden.

Earth consumes a sister,

and those who gather put aside

their desire to be noticed.

They talk, if they talk,

more softly,

as if someone were sleeping

just over the threshold,

someone they talk to still

with the frightened conscience of a child.

~

The man at the piano sees the mirror in the mirror in the piece

he plays

as an endless conversation.

The ascension of a question,

the downward movement of reply,

they make a symmetry so angelic

he hears in it the stillness

of the illuminated

elk.

He hears a violin

whose attendant grand piano floats

uneasy

through the dome of the cathedral.

If you find paradise disturbing, good.

If starred

with animals whose hearts beat fast.

In every beast, a million hydrogen bombs going off at once.

In the blood

of the diamond,

the gore and glory of the sky.

~

A great weight falls,

and what we hear is not thunder, fever, or explanation,

but wind in our jackets.

Dawn breaks over the sleeping face,

a dish of spent cigarettes

on the table.

The radio

floats in and out of consciousness,

and the space beside the widow is snow.

I do not call it progress.

I am sorry,

we say to those more bereaved than us,

which opens

a distance it would close.

The skin

between one body and another grows

more

breakable,

conscious,

more translucent.

A great weight falls,

and I do not call it progress yet.

~

Arvo Pärt was a man in exile, over and over,

called to write an anthem

of return,

a plainchant scored for smoke

and scavenger

and the one flowering

battlefield

crowned

in the wind chime of ice and stars.

On the fulcrum of the A, the lifting of the burden,

the arc

of the cry,

the sirens of a battered neighborhood

long ago.

If a dead and beautiful language opened him up

with the vast awe

of a mass grave,

it was no less personal.

The sound of one hand talking

to another,

the song of the listening

refugee who sleeps light beneath her god.

~

The widow asleep on the table says to the scalpel,

take of this, my flesh.

Take,

as if the knife had a suffering to remove

to open up the view.

The stillness after the guests have left,

with their kind words and casseroles,

is alive.

You are not alone,

it whispers to the body asleep on the table.

You are asleep on the table.

And just when you thought you understood,

the surgeon gets

to the quietest part,

when he lifts slow the damaged heart

and lays the stranger in.