A wild bear wearing a coat of fire
That spins universes
Turned the violin he dwarfed into a giant,
Cupped against chin and shoulder,
Soloist before a packed house at the Sunset Center,
Set free notes thin and luscious and dangerous
As a spider’s spun silk;
Concerto rising full and robust,
The symphony crested into a tidal wave;
Every soul surely longed
To be drowned
By the divinity of music beyond possibility,
The very fact it was happening, said,
“God is real.”
There I sat in the last row
At the top of the balcony,
In a seat comped by a new friend in the orchestra
(I had met a month ago at Counterpoint Coffee,
When overheard talking marvels about the bear)
And my new friend’s new friend Molly
In another comped seat beside me;
When we met the score’s composer, greeting
Each and all who entered the nosebleed section,
Molly had said, “Now, that’s the way to do it.”
But perhaps it was the eight-year-old girl
Sitting next to her mom
One row to the front,
Who delivered the timelessness
Of her youth as well as mine,
Those syncopated glances
Back at me over and again
With a smile of another refugee
In a small boat cramped with people
On the ocean,
Not a look of sadness, or of being lost or adrift,
Rather feeling in this house something
Emerges once to last forever,
Something like van Gogh’s starry night.
After the performance, I walked
In the dark of night with a shadow
Cast by light from windowed storefronts
Closed at 5 in sleepy Carmel,
Heading toward the tucked-away courtyard for Barmel,
What for velvet ropes and a bouncer,
Mustering all it could of “wait in line unless you’re ‘special,’”
Hollywood glitz and liquid hips,
The only rave zone rubber-stamped
In this too-quaint-for-its-own-good tourist town,
Not that raves are my thing, or my symphony pals’,
If my legs did do a little Elvis
To the techno beat
To make for the side room
Reserved to symphony players and friends,
Eight of us precariously separated
From the mashup of revelers
By the pane glass;
The wild bear met my eyes
With a look of exhaustion
from being It,
Not one iota to extinguish the flame
Which brought us this far,
And he said, “What if we played a string quartet in here,
To make something beautiful?”
Without taking to musical instruments,
Our little band of wayfarers to the muses
Made a fiercely sweet sound:
A violinist from San Francisco
Lives on a boat,
Saving money gig by gig
To make seaworthy repairs
For sailing his way to performances;
Another violinist from San Francisco
Lives in a bohemian group house
Without one other musician,
Rendering practice an impossible nuisance,
And dreams of moving south to Monterey
to let his notes fill the air;
Molly fuses art with justice
To swivel the heads of swells
Who prefer sex trafficking
Kept under the radar
For benefit of generals,
And industry titans and wannabes
And sold-out artists
Who call their paradise
Bohemian Grove.
When the virtuoso, the wild bear,
Retires to his den for sleep,
With angels and demons
Trusted with once more carrying him
The entire way in and out of bed,
Through the matinee performance tomorrow,
I watch him leave the room and walk away
Through the glass, clearly.
I’m left gazing on the lostness
I lived for so long,
A player in the cacophony
Blasted through the taverns of the world,
Tequila clawing throats, or the fat tongue
Of bourbon, or polite sparkling water with a lime,
Visions distorted
By the yearning for genitalia to ease our pain,
And condemn myself,
But to no longer spank outsiders with shame,
For I am also one of them,
If lucky enough to know
The tavern’s games are necessary,
Even sacred.
All for a time, or a lifetime,
Find ourselves out there oblivious,
Or using snatched lamps filled with strain
Over what’s going on inside the side room,
We catch ourselves looking
Through the glass, darkly.
Published in – Open Ceilings.