Between the spaces…
I’ve heard it said that the most important thing as a musician is what you don’t play. The weight of the meaning and the genius is carried by the spaces in between what you play. I’m beginning to look at life this way as well. To be more specific, some of the most important moments in my personal life seem to happen in between the events that turn into the stories I tell to entertain people. To drive this notion to its finest point though, is a poem I wrote about one of those moments that for all intents and purposes should have been anonymous, but became in its quiet, important to me.
This brief stretch of time was courtesy of a break while working with the artist Molly Zenobia in her home studio in West Lake Village, California. I took a seat on a bench swing looking out picture windows over Lake Sherwood and behind me, Molly sat back down at her grand piano and made this moment what it is. The poem is called Chamber Music.
“Chamber Music”
The keys to my soul found
not on a ring
but attached to a mechanism
throwing hammers at strings
whose vibration
moves through the soundboard
as amplified warmth.
The heat escapes the piano’s cabinet
Turns tumblers in my right atrium
slides back the bolt
then slips inside heart
Though welcome,
the frequencies
seep thinly grasping and gasping
for the attention of oxygen
into my right ventricle
before being
pushed into my lungs
There, the musical phrasings
find their breath
expand in breadth
I open like air.
The world illuminates.
A Nineteenth Century Bible
where every nerve ending is distinct with the weight
of colors.
I saturate in the emotional emulsion
of the moment
layering like on film
a double-exposed-entendre
seeking wild introspective affairs
illicit creative acts that lack domestication
but still as yet my fancies have no flight
they merely wade
on cue
a mallard glides into a window’s moving picture frame
before me
the causation of gentle ripples
cascading across the smooth surface
of Lake Sherwood
famed for the setting of one of Hollywood’s Robin Hoods
I wonder
how brave, how bold
how BIG
must your heart be
to beat with a need so strong
for the benefit of strangers?
The answer tugs the depth of field into focus
with the ease of a fluid motion camera tilt
falling upon ascending ending credits
the notes read like a long letter of love
and acceptance
the denouement
of a sustained courtship
towards one’s self
Behind me a blue-eyed Angel
serenades with an almost painful tenderness
“I reckon this’ll be
a good day for me-ee
I reckon this’ll be
a good day for me-ee”
I feel more than hear
the descent of the dampeners
halting the voice of the piano’s strings
in time
to the contraction
of my left atrium
song
passing like a train
through a town with no station
the sounds track
through my left ventricle
to the cadence of a chanteuse
lifting off to herself
giving the beast inside her wings
but it is I
who finally flies.
***The End***
Find out more about the incredible Molly Zenobia at http://www.mollyzenobia.com.
