ON HEARING A MAURICE RAVEL QUARTET

by Irving A Greenfield

The music touched me,

and I touched the music.

A theme, played by the violist,

dug out of the notes with strings and a bow,

thrown to the moment and caught something

something I did not want to remember.

The cantorial chant of the High Holy Days,

now a memory realized;

A plea for mercy, even to me, an unbeliever.

LIBERSTOAD

The mood hurls him into the past;

he’s a small boy curled up on thread-bare couch,

maybe it was green?

Half awake, half asleep,

Listening to the Saturday afternoon performance of Tristan and Isolde.

As he listens now,

seated on high-back chair next to the window with a harbor view.

He listens and reaches back into the past; the music his arms and hands.

Something magical, beyond his ability to understand how that memory,

that image so long gone came back to occupy a place in his brain,

A place he never knew he had,

especially for that insignificant moment when he was a boy

listening as he listens now to Tristan and Isolde

as eternal sleep claims him.

THE MEMORY AND THE MUSIC

The reality and the memory

bridged by the music

an outdoor concert on a sweltering summer’s night

with the salt scent of the ocean heavy in the air

a burst of music

“The William Tell Overture”

“the pounding hoof beats and a ‘high-oh Silver!’”

And a small boy is sprawled out on the floor

in front of the Majestic Radio

his gray-haired father sits close by

pretending not to listen to the daring-do

of the Masked-man and his Indian friend, Tonto

but listening all the same

The memory of it made sweeter by the music,

by the gallop of so many years