Music of Longing

During Open Circle’s Compañía de Ópera de Jalisco

The music of longing,
beneath every opera’s drama,
pours from their voices.
Koi glide among the reeds,
leaves float down from the ceiba,
and a zebra butterfly
zigzags past the outdoor stage.
Operatic voices braid,
lifting us, surprised,
from our aloneness.
Voices weave through air to ears
and render every listening heart
tender. Tender.

I think of you, your voice.
From fifty years of distance,
when you called I recognized
your pitch and cadence.
I knew your voice, I knew you,
your timbre a Buddhist bell
that obliterated years.
My ears received
the music of your only voice
and you were here.

Singers onstage
soar in grief. I feel you
standing behind my chair.
My hearing extends its range
to cross the continents and listen for
your voice in my ear.
Perhaps I’ll never see you again.
But if I never hear once more
the song in the air of your only voice,
I’ll forfeit so much more.

When the soprano’s volume drops
to faintest volume, hush of love,
it is the music of you that echoes
within my chambers.
The sound of you,
a purity of pitch beneath all speech,
the impulse of your only soul,
expressing the name
of your aural essence—
the sound of you, and then,
your vibration in the silence left behind.

While voices sing onstage
the story of longing beneath each opera,
and plait our aching human longings
into a resonant helix,
my ears receive the gift
of your soul’s reverberation.
Within me I hear,
clear and buoyant,
the dearest sound, your voice,
your only voice.

©Susa Silvermarie 2019