May
Bluster
Near the
end of cottonwood season with a May bluster rushing through, pulling
the pods themselves off the trees still full of fuzz, scattering them
across the clipped grass like handfuls of chicken feed. Standing among
the shedding cottonwoods is all you have energy for now.
It’s like
being a railway track with a long, long train on it. You’re sure the
pressure, the almost breaking, will never end, even as you know it will
because you’ve borne this heavy traveller before. The self splits, layers,
into the one who feels and the one who knows. Two rails lying parallel.
You can’t
feel what you know; you can’t acknowledge what you feel. Your brittle
layers pile one on the other, paleontological.
Oh to be
living and whole, like the dark-haired oboist who last week made such
a glory of Bach on the red church carpet! You saw her only from behind,
her compact brown body moving, kneading the notes up out of the oboe,
her legs, back and shoulders, head, neck and arms, all moving in a slight
weave, as a flame just breathed on.
The notes
and the meaning of the notes rushed all into that sound, the very ink
used to scratch out the notes, the air Bach was exhaling the moment
he wrote them down – all pulled through her swaying oboe and freed,
a whole voice, a whole music.
No layers,
fragile as fossils, there. No sediment of sticky indecision, like a
dead cottonwood pod clinging to the branch, unable to grow but unable
to throw its life to earth. Only the May bluster, the raking wind, can
pull it free now. Only the coming storm, with its thunder and thrown
hail, can bear it down.
Copyright © 2006 Diane Tucker
