This music is the country you lost
when you were born,
the cafe which never closes, the sex which
comes so close your pores are
weeping with longing, and never touches you,
the nights you don't sleep, the hands in their ceaseless
moving like birds, the conversations interrupted
only by dancing, the dancers weeping with their bodies
painted like eyes,
here where black coffee and red wine are the only
waters, where crusty bread and creamy cheese
flecked with oregano and pooling tears of olive oil
are the only foods.
It's the music you strain to hear through all the needy
ordinary days,
the music which will only stop
when you abandon everything to follow it
-- because this music lies to you, but it's a gorgeous lie,
full of such craving and entreaty, the chance for nothing
to be ordinary, ever.
It's like Conrad's heart of darkness, says the guitarist
later, when you introduce yourself
and learn he has a day job, he's a psychologist,
this isn't Seville, just College Avenue in Oakland,
the passions so much larger than our bodies
are lodged in our bodies, there is nothing we can do
to be rid of them, not the passions, not the bodies,
because whatever you make of your life
the soul keeps turning the other way,
like a child leaning backwards
over a railing toward the water, hanging by its feet,
so this music which is motion itself, you want it
to hold still,
its frenzy fixed so you can look
through its violet scarlet tangerine lens --
and glimpse your life there, floating in the colors
-Ruth L. Schwartz