dreaming of Arvo Pärt

Arvo Pärt improvising on the pipe organ, its
ivory keys yellowed, exhaling notes that can't 
be gauged—the mauve shade drawn just now be-
tween the land of the sacred & everyday
night—& last year's blossoming jigsaw
puzzles & wheelchair & charcoal pencil all
waiting for the tintinnabulation of
next week’s waning February moon

& kids kicking a ball in the park by the brick 
firehouse under a blue blue sky streaked with one
contrail angling southwest one line of mare’s tails
angling southeast to meet at a point in in-
finite space beyond the white clapboard
cottage where an orange caged finch warbles—kids
in blue red purple gray black pink plumage, the 
grass lush from January rain & uncut though
who can tell how tomorrow will rise up east of
the viridian water tower & this
instant & eternity struggling within us &

back east an actual snowfall & your breath
plain to hear as if even snowflakes failed to
absorb the sound the rib cage no longer in-
voluntary & the body's polyphony a
temple bell sounding a g note transmuted
to its natural harmonic at the guitar's
19th fret escaping the ramshackle fence col-
lapsing under wisteria & ivy & last year's

rose hips last year's hickory leaves fallen like
stars to the sidewalk—the gray stone exterior
of a Chinese restaurant named Swan Garden
blanketed in moss as if each stone dozed in
the slanting afternoon sun rays where life goes
white without a prism—tonight will be clear
but the moon wanes & just last Friday it rose
waxing aluminum white above the 20th
Avenue Bridge between the horns of a steel
cloud as if an antlered crane tomb guardian soared
from ancient Chu to your Massachusetts bedside—
 
on Interstate a flock of seagulls swoops
counterclockwise above the light rail: gray-
white cries tracing catenaries & intersections;
to the north a pair of crows arc clockwise black 
& purple: these birds describing a figure 
8 infinity while Arvo Pärt, hands on a chord,
feet on the pedals, raises his beatific beard,
enunciates nunc dimittis, sends it floating
floating up to the net of unblinking stars


Jack Hayes
© 2016



More music by Arvo Pärt will appear tomorrow & Friday.