mary
catholic girl
your day on the farm
(the open-skulled experience) --

as the stars played their clock function

you grew (as women grow)

you crawled to the minnesota rhythm

begat from a jalisco rhythm, a michoacan rhythm

a spanish/conquistadorian rhythm,

an apache/mayan rhythm -

from a fractured, multitudinous rhythm
of centuries of amplifications
and cancellations

of a long, accreted melody

you composed your life:
girl to woman


dear mary:
what exactly is the melody's tone,
its character?

is it a brassy victory march?
a romantic pastoral etude interwoven with
security & pleasantry?

or

is it a dirty dusty field song more tortured
than victorious?


mary
(i really want to know):

do you know your own
song?


ii.
mary
catholic girl
maybe to query about
your opus so directly
is unfair

maybe no one
on the planet listens to their music
so intently

maybe i yearn
to make sense of
so many un-musical notes
from a large segment of humanity

maybe morose tragic music
is supposed to mean something
more than audible entertainment

maybe the
most gifted composers of legend
transcribed the
murmurs of actual lives

into real human meaning

to create artifact,
not artifice


here is my point:
mary
(brown catholic girl)
has a life
that is idiosyncratic -

her music is its own construction
fundamentally she has lived-thought-spoken
her phonetic composition
for history - in history

so many crescendos and denouements
so many exclamations and impassioned
pleas
with so many incoherencies, new
musical terms must be defined

(by those savvy enough)


iii.
the world is a symphony
of the grand experience,
strong with 8 billion instruments

i often wonder what our planet,
in aggregate,
sounds like

i wonder if our collective experience
is a signature somehow of where
we are in the grand cosmic scheme,
of what we are as human

a grand musical expression
of 8 billion individual expressions

one would have to listen very long
and very hard to grasp the nuances
(one would have to care this much)

what do our wars sound like,
in aggregate -
our collective suffering?

(i wonder: is this pain really
"music" at all, from the
grand perspective?)

what do our births, copulations
& death gasps sound like,
in unison,
and through time?

and im wondering (now)
what the poets
contribute to this noise
of ourselves -

are we some device,
some affectation,
some normalizing effect,
some marker?

or

are we drowned out
by like-opposites
and cancelled
in the grand scheme
of the grand perpective?


iv.
mary:
little girl

mary:
catholic girl

mary:
brown woman
in a white man's world

mary:
with all the vagaries of
womanhood

mary:
with the struggle of self definition

mary:
within the paradigms
of the current psychology

mary:
with the musics you copy
and re-transmit

mary:
older now and with nuanced
experience

mary:
with new worlds
in your sight

mary


mary.