I am a--
I'll do it.
How many of you listen to classical music
every now and then, could I see your hands?
OK.
So I'm sure you've heard of Vivaldi?
OK.
I am one of these people, and I must confess it,
but I'm a heretic.
I do not like Vivaldi.
I think if my radio station in Washington
plays him one more time, I'm going
to go down there with a baseball bat, and get those guys myself.
I am sick of Vivaldi.
Thank you.
And sometimes, in order to get rid of something like that,
I have to live with it or find some other way to exorcise
the person, or place, or thing.
And I figured the best way to exorcise Vivaldi
was to do a poem about him.
Not about Vivaldi, but in a way, about Vivaldi.
And that way, I can make peace with him wherever you are,
dear Vivaldi, I'm trying.
This is called "Vivaldi Dent."
I didn't know much about her except she walked about as
if she had nails in her shoes.
They say her dead husband put them there
because he walked on fire while he lived,
and he wanted her to share his suffering, which she's
so often registered in her prideful self--
her daytime pride, not her nighttime pride.
That was always different.
She knew somewhere there was someone named
Vivaldi whom her mother liked.
But she never had never met him, only
in her mother's small voice shaping the kitchen day,
and hums and sometimes shrieks and all those lead kind
of lights sprinkled in between.
Then her mother let slip the child from herself
on a late September evening, drenched in the blood sky
on an immaculate hospital bed that punished her
for being so early.
And she made the Vivaldi noise once again.
Everybody said it was a sweet sound,
but too full of ins and outs, not like our everyday,
don't-you-bother-me music, and Viv dent came from that
meandering birth.
Messing around with an unintended love,
and a father buried beneath an old Solomon tree
that didn't know its real name.
Her mother had a 78 record on a small table next to her bed.
When the moonlight picked it up to shine
in her mother's dreams, she would
awake, put the record on the playing machine,
and listen to it over and over again.
Just for the sound like that of water roots running
around stars, like babies practicing their
cries before leaving the comfort of a warm belly for someplace
unknown and edgy.
That was long ago.
Now, I go by and hear it sometimes,
and Viv comes to the white porch her father built
that's now scaly and blustery with a cup of tea in her hands,
and sits on a spindly wooden railing, and sips
from the cup in the late afternoon
as though she never knew anything else but tea
and white porches and the legacy of a 78.
They say she's olding and losing it.
Her dark hair shows her taken years and hollows of gray
around her brown and silken cheeks.
But every day at four, she cherishes her tea
before she forgets to wave at the neighbors.
And inside the house, swollen, but there are
good smells coming from the kitchen enveloping
the impatient rooms.
Some days, there is rain eating the sun,
and while I watch caterpillars ease themselves
over the autumn woods behind the house,
she stares down that empty road that leads nowhere,
and warms her tea and the leftover sun.
And I discovered that in all my locked-in tender years,
I know nothing at all.
But this, I do know, her mother loved Mr. Vivaldi,
and that is how she got her name.