Patrick Yarker
Glass harmonica
A row of glass bowls
ranged along a spindle
in a rosewood trough
and spun by a treadle
and spun, till
freewheeling
they break at a touch
into music...
Dumb and dusty now,
a museum-piece
I heard on the radio,
its voice the North wind
skating downstream,
in its wake a surf
of snow from branches
lifted, swayed,
New England birches
elk step clear of,
check at the brink
of the bank, perplexed.
Not water: a hiss
like gas escaping.
The soul of the ice.
I listen too,
from the clapboard house
among fields white as pickets
or the wide white steps
up to the back porch
where a ziggurat of chopped wood
hoards the old year
in a musk of pine and leaf-mould.
Homesick, sick of snow’s
one note, no pioneer,
I bend to the radio
whose face lights up, and the music
is names I’ve turned
in the cold trough
my mouth,
and touched to hear:
Oswegatchie, Taconic,
Housatonic, Delaware,
all the songs of the rivers
still
under the gag.
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Page(s) 58-59
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