A Tale While Listening to Mischa Maisky Playing Bach

This is about as close to stream-of-consciousness type writing as I come. I typed the lines while listening to Bach’s Cello Suite (No. 1 in G major), played by the great cellist Mischa Maisky for the 2020 virtual Lausitz Festival. Here is the link:

As I write this, I am still listening; it is a wonderful concert by Maisky and Martha Argerich, a performance in the beautiful Goerlitz Synagogue.

I’m certain too that my lines are influenced by a recent hearing of Mahler’s 4th Symphony, with its setting of the song “Das Himmlische Leben”.

My work more often shows the impact of the classic English poets whose lines taught me to think and write and even to speak. But I do love the German and Austrian Romantic poets also.

Now, here is the poem.

---

I hear the golden light
And velvet dark together interwoven
Line by line within the cello’s voice,
Singing harmonies of a world that was
And is not, nor maybe ever was
Save in the mind, ordered and generous
Of beauty piled high, something organic
As a forest full of leaves and birds
And tree trunks of a thousand years
On stone that’s always been.

There is a promise in such sound;
I wrap it in my hands and lift it to my ears—
Notes dripping through the passing web of time;
Promise of all things falling into place:
The roots still sprouting from the stone,
The leaves still growing on the twig,
No longer withered on the ground
And blowing sere about my heart.
Life is within us but upon us too;
And even sound is life, sweet music
A vision and divine, a touch of God’s hand
Warm against the cold reality;
For time takes all—yes, time and death;
But as the minutes pass, laced through the melody
Of strings and wood, we see all things alive.

Therefore,
Dance at the gates of heaven,
And let old Time dance too
Like some old miser in a tale of yore,
Who turned the princess to a thing of stone
Until the lad came and sprinkled her
With dewdrops from the flower of life;
Ah, and the miser (well he might be)
Forced to dance himself to death
In merry tunes upon a Sabbath’s eve.