September 2019
Steve Klepetar
sfklepetar@icloud.com
sfklepetar@icloud.com
Author’s Note: My parents loved music, especially opera, but neither one of them could carry even the simplest tune. My mother’s voice was awful, my father’s was worse, yet somehow, when I was a child, I had a lovely voice. Or so they tell me. Evidently, I brought down the house at summer camp singing “No Man is an Island” and I was a smash hit in my first-grade class musical, “The Lonely Abalonian.” Then my voice changed. Now if I try to sing, the neighborhood dogs set to howling and my wife dissolves in laughter. Here are three poems sort of about songs.
Out Loud
No, I wouldn’t say it out loud,
not even here in this canyon.
Overhead birds are screeching through the sky.
It hasn’t rained for seven weeks.
The dry air chafes our skin.
We have been climbing all day, slowly,
the way we manage now.
Every time our feet strike this rocky ground,
I hear a kind of music, but where it comes from
I don’t know. It’s not the echo of footfalls,
but something deeper,
not quite a rumbling in the rocks,
but a sweep of notes struggling to enter the world.
When the Forecast Comes True
All this wind, all this rain. How it startles,
even when the forecast comes true
and the world becomes seven bands of mist.
Across the yard, the slough rises, ducks
pass through drooping reeds.
Once my father and I were caught
in a storm, hiking on a trail
in Massachusetts.
At first the dense canopy kept us dry,
but soon the trees were dripping,
shaking sheets of rain as wind
raked across their boughs.
My father sang in his dreadful baritone.
I would have cried, but thunder
drowned my tears.
The trail turned to mud.
All I could think of was sailors drowning
as sea maids dragged them down.
We trudged silent through that downpour
until we made it back to the café
where my mother sat drinking coffee,
warm and dry, nostrils flaring in contempt.
A Song
keeps playing in my head, a woman wishing
for rain, wishing for a doorway to a darker sky.
It’s my voice mouthing half-remembered words,
my whiskey tenor butchering the tricky tune,
but if I listen for a moment, it’s the woman
who sang it long ago, using an invented name.
What a thin voice, but plaintive and lovely
in its desire to please. She’s wishing she was
home again, that the trees in her mother’s yard
would speak as they did long ago, in a language
of roots and earth and stone. She’s singing about
a ship that would sail into the harbor past the village,
with its white church and red brick school, a vessel
pulling clouds, dolphins leaping in its foamy wake.
Out Loud
No, I wouldn’t say it out loud,
not even here in this canyon.
Overhead birds are screeching through the sky.
It hasn’t rained for seven weeks.
The dry air chafes our skin.
We have been climbing all day, slowly,
the way we manage now.
Every time our feet strike this rocky ground,
I hear a kind of music, but where it comes from
I don’t know. It’s not the echo of footfalls,
but something deeper,
not quite a rumbling in the rocks,
but a sweep of notes struggling to enter the world.
When the Forecast Comes True
All this wind, all this rain. How it startles,
even when the forecast comes true
and the world becomes seven bands of mist.
Across the yard, the slough rises, ducks
pass through drooping reeds.
Once my father and I were caught
in a storm, hiking on a trail
in Massachusetts.
At first the dense canopy kept us dry,
but soon the trees were dripping,
shaking sheets of rain as wind
raked across their boughs.
My father sang in his dreadful baritone.
I would have cried, but thunder
drowned my tears.
The trail turned to mud.
All I could think of was sailors drowning
as sea maids dragged them down.
We trudged silent through that downpour
until we made it back to the café
where my mother sat drinking coffee,
warm and dry, nostrils flaring in contempt.
A Song
keeps playing in my head, a woman wishing
for rain, wishing for a doorway to a darker sky.
It’s my voice mouthing half-remembered words,
my whiskey tenor butchering the tricky tune,
but if I listen for a moment, it’s the woman
who sang it long ago, using an invented name.
What a thin voice, but plaintive and lovely
in its desire to please. She’s wishing she was
home again, that the trees in her mother’s yard
would speak as they did long ago, in a language
of roots and earth and stone. She’s singing about
a ship that would sail into the harbor past the village,
with its white church and red brick school, a vessel
pulling clouds, dolphins leaping in its foamy wake.
© 2019 Steve Klepetar
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